
THE DROESHOUT ORIGINAL PORTRAIT OF SHAKESPEARE 

(Original of the famous Droeshout print prefixed to the First Folio [1623] of Shakespeare's 

plays) 



THE 

AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

BY 
ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 




HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS 

NEW YORK AND LONDON 

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Books by 
ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 



Poetical Works. 8vo. 6 Volumes, 
Tragedies. 8vo. s Volumes . . 

Lyrical Poems. 8vo 

Love's Cross Currents. Post 8vo 
The Duke of Gandia. 8vo . . 
The Age of Shakespeare. Svo . 



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Copyright, 1908, by Harper & Brothers. 

All rights reserved. 
Published September, 1908. 



TO 
THE MEMORY OF 

CHARLES LAMB 



When stark oblivion froze above their names 

Whose glory shone round Shakespeare's, bright as now, 
One eye beheld their light shine full as fame's, 

One hand im veiled it: this did none but thou. 
Love, stronger than forgetfulness and sleep, 

Rose, and bade memory rise, and England hear: 
And all the harvest left so long to reap 

Shone ripe and rich in every sheaf and ear. 

A child it was who first by grace of thine 

Communed with gods who share with thee their shrine: 

Elder than thou wast ever now I am. 
Now that I lay before thee in thanksgiving 
Praise of dead men divine and everliving 

Whose praise is thine as thine is theirs, Charles Lamb. 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 

CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE i 

JOHN WEBSTER 15 

THOMAS DEKKER 61^ 

JOHN MARSTON 112 

THOMAS MIDDLETON 150 

WILLIAM ROWLEY 187 

THOMAS HEYWOOD 200 

GEORGE CHAPMAN 255 

CYRIL TOURNEUR ^ . 262 

INDEX 291 



THE 
AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 



CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE 

The first great English poet was the father of 
English tragedy and the creator of English blank 
verse. Chaucer and Spenser were great writers 
and great men : they shared between them every 
gift which goes to the making of a poet except 
the one which alone can make a poet, in the 
proper sense of the word, great. Neither pathos 
nor humor nor fancy nor invention will suffice 
for that: no poet is great as a poet whom no 
one could ever pretend to recognize as sublime. 
Sublimity is the test of imagination as distin- 
guished from invention or from fancy: and the 
first English poet whose powers can be called 
sublime was Christopher Marlowe. 

The majestic and exquisite excellence of va- 
rious lines and passages in Marlowe's first play 
must be admitted to relieve, if it cannot be allow- 
ed to redeem, the stormy monotony of Titanic 
truculence which blusters like a simoom through 
the noisy course of its ten fierce acts. With many 



2 THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

and heavy faults, there is something of genuine 
greatness in "Tamburlaine the Great"; and for 
two grave reasons it must always be remembered 
with distinction and mentioned with honor. It 
is the first poem ever written in English blank 
verse, as distinguished from mere rhymeless 
decasyllabics; and it contains one of the noblest 
passages — perhaps, indeed, the noblest in the lit- 
erature of the world — ever written by one of the 
greatest masters of poetry in loving praise of the 
glorious delights and sublime submission to the 
everlasting limits of his art. In its highest and 
most distinctive qualities, in unfaltering and in- 
fallible command of the right note of music and 
the proper tone of color for the finest touches 
of poetic execution, no poet of the most elabo- 
rate modern school, working at ease upon every 
consummate resource of luxurious learning and 
leisurely refinement, has ever excelled the best 
and most representative work of' a man who had 
literally no models before him, and probably or 
evidently was often, if not always, compelled to 
write against time for his living. 

The just and generous judgment passed by 
Goethe on the "Faustus" of his English pred- 
ecessor in tragic treatment of the same subject 
is somewhat more than sufficient to counterbal- 
ance the slighting or the sneering references to 



CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE 3 

that magnificent poem which might have been 
expected from the ignorance of Byron or the 
incompetence of Hallam. And the particular 
note of merit observed, the special point of the 
praise conferred, by the great German poet should 
be no less sufficient to dispose of the vulgar mis- 
conception yet lingering among sciolists and pre- 
tenders to criticism, which regards a writer than 
whom no man was ever born with a finer or a 
stronger instinct for perfection of excellence in 
execution as a mere noble savage of letters, a 
rough self-taught sketcher or scribbler of crude 
and rude genius, whose unhewn blocks of verse 
had in them some veins of rare enough metal to 
be quarried and polished by Shakespeare. What 
most impressed the author of " Faust " in the work 
of Marlowe was a quality the want of which in the 
author of "Manfred" is proof enough to consign 
his best work to the second or third class at most. 
" How greatly it is all planned !" the first requisite 
of all great work, and one of which the highest 
genius possible to a greatly gifted barbarian could 
by no possibility understand the nature or con- 
ceive the existence. That Goethe "had thought 
of translating it" is perhaps hardly less precious 
a tribute to its greatness than the fact that it has 
been actually and admirably translated by the 
matchless translator of Shakespeare — the son of 



4 THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

Victor Hugo, whose labor of love may thus be 
said to have made another point in common, and 
forged as it were another link of union, between 
Shakespeare and the young master of Shake- 
speare's youth. Of all great poems in dramatic 
form it is perhaps the most remarkable for abso- 
lute singleness of aim and simplicity of construc- 
tion ; yet is it wholly free from all possible imputa- 
tion of monotony or aridity, " Tamburlaine " is 
monotonous in the general roll and flow of its 
stately and sonorous verse through a noisy wilder- 
ness of perpetual bluster and slaughter; but the 
unity of tone and purpose in "Doctor Faustus" 
is not unrelieved by change of manner and 
variety of incident. The comic scenes, written 
evidently with as little of labor as of relish, are for 
the most part scarcely more than transcripts, 
thrown into the form of dialogue, from a popular 
prose History of Dr. Faustus, and therefore 
should be set down as little to the discredit 
as to the credit of the poet. Few masterpieces 
of any age in any language can stand beside this 
tragic poem — it has hardly the structure of a 
play — for the qualities of terror and splendor, 
for intensity of purpose and sublimity of note. 
In the vision of Helen, for example, the intense 
perception of loveliness gives actual sublimity to 
the sweetness and radiance of mere beauty in the 



CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE 5 

passionate and spontaneous selection of words 
the most choice and perfect; and in Hke manner 
the sublimity of simplicity in Marlowe's concep- 
tion and expression of the agonies endured by 
Faustus under the immediate imminence of his^ 
doom gives the highest note of beauty, the qual- 
ity of absolute fitness and propriety, to the sheer 
straightforwardness of speech in which his ago- 
nizing horror finds vent ever more and more ter- 
rible from the first to the last equally beautiful 
and fearful verse of that tremendous monologue 
which has no parallel in all the range of tragedy. 
It is now a commonplace of criticism to ob- 
serve and regret the decline of power and interest 
after the opening acts of "The Jew of Malta." 
This decHne is undeniable, though even the latter 
part of the play is not wanting in rough energy 
and a coarse kind of interest; but the first two 
acts would be sufficient foundation for the dura- 
ble fame of a dramatic poet. In the blank verse 
of Milton alone, who perhaps was hardly less 
indebted than Shakespeare was before him to 
Marlowe as the first English master of word- 
music in its grander forms, has the glory or the 
melody of passages in the opening soliloquy of 
Barabas been possibly surpassed. The figure of 
the hero before it degenerates into caricature is as 
finely touched as the poetic execution is excellent ; 



6 THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

and the rude and rapid sketches of the minor 
characters show at least some vigor and vivacity 
of touch. 

In " Edward 11." the interest rises and th? ex- 
ecution improves as visibly and as greatly with 
the course of the advancing story as they de- 
cline in "The Jew of Malta." The scene of the 
king's deposition at Kenilworth is almost as much 
finer in tragic effect and poetic quality as it is 
shorter and less elaborate than the corresponding 
scene in Shakespeare's "King Richard II." The 
terror of the death scene undoubtedly rises into 
horror ; but this horror is with skilful simplicity of 
treatment preserved from passing into disgust. 
In pure poetry, in sublime and splendid imagina- 
tion, this tragedy is excelled by "Doctor Faus- 
tus"; in dramatic power and positive impression 
of natural effect it is as certainly the masterpiece 
of Marlowe. It was almost inevitable, in the 
hands of any poet but Shakespeare, that none of 
the characters represented should be capable of 
securing or even exciting any finer sympathy or 
more serious interest than attends on the mere 
evolution of successive events or the mere dis- 
play of emotions (except always in the great 
scene of the deposition) rather animal than 
spiritual in their expression of rage or tenderness 
or suffering. The exact balance of mutual effect, 



CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE 7 

the final note of scenic harmony between ideal 
conception and realistic execution, is not yet 
struck with perfect accuracy of touch and se- 
curity of hand; but on this point also Marlowe 
has here come nearer by many degrees to Shake.- 
speare than any of his other predecessors have 
ever come near to Marlowe. 

Of " The Massacre at Paris" it is impossible to 
judge fairly from the garbled fragment of its 
genuine text, which is all that has come down 
to us. To Mr. Collier, among numberless other 
obligations, we owe the discovery of a striking 
passage excised in the piratical edition which 
gives us the only version extant of this unlucky 
play; and which, it must be allowed, contains 
nothing of quite equal value. This is obviously 
an occasional and polemical work, and being as it 
is overcharged with the anti-Catholic passion of 
the time, has a typical quality which gives it some 
empirical significance and interest. That anti- 
papal ardor is indeed the only note of unity in a 
rough and ragged chronicle which shambles and 
stumbles onward from the death of Queen Jeanne 
of Navarre to the murder of the last Valois. It 
is possible to conjecture what it would be fruitless 
to af!irm, that it gave a hint in the next century 
to Nathaniel Lee for his far superior and really 
admirable tragedy on the same subject, issued 



8 THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

ninety -seven years after the death of Mar- 
lowe. 

The tragedy of "Dido, Queen of Carthage," 
was probably completed for the stage after that 
irreparable and incalculable loss to English letters 
by Thomas Nash, the worthiest English precursor 
of Swift in vivid, pure, and passionate prose, 
embodying the most terrible and splendid quali- 
ties of a personal and social satirist ; a man gifted 
also with some fair faculty of elegiac and even 
lyric verse, but in nowise qualified to put on the 
buskin left behind him by the ' ' famous gracer of 
tragedians," as Marlowe had already been des- 
ignated by their common friend Greene from 
among the worthiest of his fellows. In this some- 
what thin-spun and evidently hasty play a servile 
fidelity to the text of Virgil's narrative has nat- 
urally resulted in the failure which might have 
been expected from an attempt at once to tran- 
scribe what is essentially inimitable and to repro- 
duce it under the hopelessly alien conditions of 
dramatic adaptation. The one really noble pas- 
sage in a generally feeble and incomposite piece 
of work is, however, uninspired by the unattain- 
able model to which the dramatists have been 
only too obsequious in their subservience. 

It is as nearly certain as anything can be 
which depends chiefly upon cumulative and 



CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE 9 

collateral evidence that the better part of what is 
best in the serious scenes of " King Henry VI." is 
mainly the work of Marlowe. That he is, at any 
rate, the principal author of the second and third 
plays passing under that name among the works 
of Shakespeare, but first and imperfectly printed 
as " The Contention between the two Famous 
Houses of York and Lancaster," can hardly be 
now a matter of debate among competent judges. 
The crucial difficulty of criticism in this matter is 
to determine, if indeed we should not rather say 
to conjecture, the authorship of the humorous 
scenes in prose, showing as they generally do a 
power of comparatively high and pure comic 
realism to which nothing in the acknowledged 
works of any pre-Shakespearean dramatist is even 
remotely comparable. Yet, especially in the orig- 
inal text of these scenes as they stand unpuri- 
fied by the ultimate revision of Shakespeare, 
there are tones and touches which recall rather 
the clownish horseplay and homely ribaldry of 
his predecessors than anything in the lighter 
interludes of his very earliest plays. We find 
the same sort of thing which we find in their 
writings, only better done than they usually do 
it, rather than such work as Shakespeare's a little 
worse done than usual. And even in the final 
text of the tragic or metrical scenes the highest 



lo THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

note struck is always, with one magnificent and 
unquestionable exception, rather in the key of 
Marlowe at his best than of Shakespeare while 
yet in great measure his disciple. 

It is another commonplace of criticism to 
affirm that Marlowe had not a touch of comic 
genius, not a gleam of wit in him or a twinkle of 
humor: but it is an indisputable fact that he 
had. In "The Massacre at Paris," the soliloquy 
of the soldier lying in wait for the minion of 
Henri III. has the same very rough but very real 
humor as a passage in the "Contention" which 
was cancelled by the reviser. The same hand is 
unmistakable in both these broad and boyish 
outbreaks of unseemly but undeniable fun : and if 
we might wish it rather less indecorous, we must 
admit that the tradition which denies all sense of 
humor and all instinct of wit to the first great 
poet of England is no less unworthy of serious 
notice or elaborate refutation than the charges 
and calumnies of an informer who was duly hang- 
ed the year after Marlowe's death. For if the 
same note of humor is struck in an undoubted 
play of Marlowe's and in a play of disputed 
authorship, it is evident that the rest of the 
scene in the latter play must also be Marlowe's. 
And in that unquestionable case the superb and 
savage humor of the terribly comic scenes which 



CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE ii 

represent with such rough magnificence of realism 
the riot of Jack Cade and his ruffians through the 
ravaged streets of London must be recognizable 
as no other man's than his. It is a pity we have 
not before us for comparison the comic scenes 
or burlesque interludes of " Tamburlaine " which 
the printer or publisher, as he had the impudence 
to avow in his prefatory note, purposely omitted 
and left out. 

The author of A Study of Shakespeare was 
therefore wrong, and utterly wrong, when in a 
book issued some quarter of a century ago he 
followed the lead of Mr. Dyce in assuming that 
because the author of "Doctor Faustus" and 
"The Jew of Malta" "was as certainly" — and 
certainly it is difficult to deny that whether as 
a mere transcriber or as an original dealer in 
pleasantry he sometimes was — "one of the least 
and worst among jesters as he was one of the 
best and greatest among poets," he could not 
have had a hand in the admirable comic scenes 
of " The Taming of the Shrew." For it is now, I 
should hope, unnecessary to insist that the able 
and conscientious editor to whom his fame and 
his readers owe so great a debt was over-hasty in 
assuming and asserting that he was a poet "to 
whom, we have reason to believe, nature had 
denied even a moderate talent for the humorous," 



12 THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

The serious or would-be poetical scenes of the 
play are as unmistakably the work of an imitator 
as are most of the better passages in "Titus 
Andronicus" and "King Edward III." Greene 
or Peele may be responsible for the bad poetry, 
but there is no reason to suppose that the great 
poet whose mannerisms he imitated with so stu- 
pid a servility was incapable of the good fun. 

Had every copy of Marlowe's boyish version 
or perversion of Ovid's Elegies deservedly per- 
ished in the flames to which it was judicially con- 
demned by the sentence of a brace of prelates, 
it is possible that an occasional bookworm, it is 
certain that no poetical student, would have de- 
plored its destruction, if its demerits — ^hardly re- 
lieved, as his first competent editor has happily 
remarked, by the occasional incidence of a fine 
and felicitous couplet — could in that case have 
been imagined. His translation of the first book 
of Lucan alternately rises above the original and 
falls short of it; often inferior to the Latin in 
point and weight of expressive rhetoric, now and 
then brightened by a clearer note of poetry and 
lifted into a higher mood of verse. Its terseness, 
vigor, and purity of style would in any case have 
been praiseworthy, but are nothing less than ad- 
mirable, if not wonderful, when we consider how 
close the translator has on the whole (in spite 



CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE 13 

of occasional slips into inaccuracy) kept himself 
to the most rigid limit of Hteral representation, 
phrase by phrase and often line by line. The 
really startling force and felicity of occasional 
verses are worthier of remark than the inevitable 
stiffness and heaviness of others, when the tech- 
nical difficulty of such a task is duly taken into 
account. 

One of the most faultless lyrics and one of the 
loveliest fragments in the whole range of descrip- 
tive and fanciful poetry would have secured a 
place for Marlowe among the memorable men of 
his epoch, even if his plays had perished with him- 
self. His "Passionate Shepherd" remains ever 
since unrivalled in its way — a way of pure fancy 
and radiant melody without break or lapse. The 
untitled fragment, on the other hand, has been 
very closely rivalled, perhaps very happily imi- 
tated, but only by the greatest lyric poet of 
England— by Shelley alone. Marlowe's poem of 
"Hero and Leander," closing with the sunrise 
which closes the night of the lovers' union, stands 
alone in its age, and far ahead of the work of any 
possible competitor between the death of Spenser 
and the dawn of Milton. In clear mastery of 
narrative and presentation, in melodious ease 
and simplicity of strength, it is not less pre- 
eminent than in the adorable beauty and im- 



14 THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

peccable perfection of separate lines or pas- 
sages. 

The place and the value of Christopher Mar- 
lowe as a leader among English poets it would be 
almost impossible for historical criticism to over- 
estimate. To none of them all, perhaps, have so 
many of the greatest among them been so deeply 
and so directly indebted. Nor was ever any 
great writer's influence upon his fellows more 
utterly and unmixedly an influence for good. He 
first, and he alone, guided Shakespeare into the 
right way of work; his music, in which there is 
no echo of any man's before him, found its own 
echo in the more prolonged but hardly more 
exalted harmony of Milton's. He is the greatest 
discoverer, the most daring and inspired pioneer, 
in all our poetic literature. Before him there 
was neither genuine blank verse nor genuine 
tragedy in our language. After his arrival the 
way was prepared, the paths were made straight, 
for Shakespeare. 



JOHN WEBSTER 

There were many poets in the age of Shake- 
speare who make us think, as we read them, 
that the characters in their plays could not have 
spoken more beautifully, more powerfully, more 
effectively, under the circumstances imagined 
for the occasion of their utterance : there are only 
two who make us feel that the words assigned 
to the creatures of their genius are the very 
words they must have said, the only words they 
could have said, the actual words they assured- 
ly did say. Mere literary power, mere poetic 
beauty, mere charm of passionate or pathetic 
fancy, we find in varying degrees dispersed 
among them all alike; but the crowning gift of 
imagination, the power to make us realize that 
thus and not otherwise it was, that thus and not 
otherwise it must have been, was given — except 
by exceptional fits and starts — to none of the 
poets of their time but only to Shakespeare and 
to Webster. 

Webster, it may be said, was but as it were a 



1 6 THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

limb of Shakespeare: but that hmb, it might be 
rephed, was the right arm. "The kingly-crown- 
ed head, the vigilant eye," whose empire of 
thought and whose reach of vision no other man's 
faculty has ever been found competent to match, 
are Shakespeare's alone forever: but the force of 
hand, the fire of heart, the fervor of pity, the 
sympathy of passion, not poetic or theatric mere- 
ly, but actual and immediate, are qualities in 
which the lesser poet is not less certainly or less 
unmistakably pre-eminent than the greater. 
And there is no third to be set beside them : not 
even if we turn from their contemporaries to 
Shelley himself. All that Beatrice says in The 
Cenci is beautiful and conceivable and admirable : 
but unless we except her exquisite last words — 
and even they are more beautiful than inevitable 
— we shall hardly find what we find in " King 
Lear" and "The White Devil," "Othello" and 
"The Duchess of Malfy " — the tone of convinc- 
ing reality ; the note, as a critic of our own day 
might call it, of certitude. 

There are poets — in our own age, as in all past 
ages — from whose best work it might be difficult 
to choose at a glance some verse sufficient to 
establish their claim — great as their claim may 
be — to be remembered forever; and who yet 
may be worthy of remembrance among all but 



JOHN WEBSTER 17 

the highest. Webster is not one of these : though 
his fame assuredly does not depend upon the 
merit of a casual passage here or there, it would 
be easy to select from any one of his represent- 
ative plays such examples of the highest, the 
purest, the most perfect power, as can be found 
only in the works of the greatest among poets. 
There is not, as far as my studies have ever ex- 
tended, a third English poet to whom these 
words might rationally be attributed by the con- 
jecture of a competent reader: 

We cease to grieve, cease to be fortune's slaves, 
Nay, cease to die, by dying. 

There is a depth of severe sense in them, a height 
of heroic scorn, or a dignity of quiet cynicism, 
which can scarcely be paralleled in the bitterest 
or the fiercest effusions of John Marston or Cyril 
Toumeur or Jonathan Swift. Nay, were they not 
put into the mouth of a criminal cynic, they 
would not seem unworthy of Epictetus. There 
is nothing so grand in the part of Edmund; the 
one figure in Shakespeare whose aim in life, 
whose centre of character, is one with the view 
or the instinct of Webster's two typical villains. 
Some touches in the part of Flamineo suggest, 
if not a conscious imitation, an unconscious 
reminiscence of that prototype : but the essential 



i8 THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

and radical originality of Webster's genius is 
shown in the difference of accent with which the 
same savage and sarcastic philosophy of self- 
interest finds expression through the snarl and 
sneer of his ambitious cynic. Monsters as they 
may seem of unnatural egotism and unallayed 
ferocity, the one who dies penitent, though his 
repentance be as sudden if not as suspicious as 
any ever wrought by miraculous conversion, dies 
as thoroughly in character as the one who takes 
leave of life in a passion of scorn and defiant irony 
which hardly passes off at last into a mood of 
mocking and triumphant resignation. There is a 
cross of heroism in almost all Webster's charac- 
ters which preserves the worst of them from such 
hatefulness as disgusts us in certain of Fletcher's 
or of Ford's : they have in them some salt of man- 
hood, some savor of venturesome and humorous 
resolution, which reminds us of the heroic age in 
which the genius that begot them was bom and 
reared — the age of Richard Grenville and Francis 
Drake, Philip Sidney and William Shakespeare. 
The earliest play of Webster's now surviving 
— if a work so piteously mutilated and defaced 
can properly be said to survive — is a curious 
example of the combined freedom and realism 
with which recent or even contemporary history 
was habitually treated on the stage during the 



JOHN WEBSTER 19 

last years of the reign of Queen Elizabeth. The 
noblest poem known to me of this peculiar kind 
is the play of "Sir Thomas More," first printed 
by Mr. Dyce in 1844 for the Shakespeare Society: 
the worst must almost certainly be that " Chron- 
icle History of Thomas Lord Cromwell " which 
the infallible verdict of German intuition has dis- 
covered to be "not only unquestionably Shake- 
speare's, but worthy to be classed among his best 
and maturest works." About midway between 
these two I should be inclined to rank " The Fa- 
mous History of Sir Thomas Wyatt," a mangled 
and deformed abridgment of a tragedy by Dekker 
and Webster on the story of Lady Jane Grey. In 
this tragedy, as in the two comedies due to the 
collaboration of the same poets, it appears to me 
more than probable that Dekker took decidedly 
the greater part. The shambling and slipshod 
metre, which seems now and then to hit by mere 
chance on some pure and tender note of simple 
and exquisite melody — the lazy vivacity and im- 
pulsive inconsequence of style — the fitful sort 
of slovenly inspiration, with interludes of abso- 
lute and headlong collapse — are qualities by 
which a very novice in the study of dramatic 
form may recognize the reckless and unmis- 
takable presence of Dekker. The curt and 
grim precision of Webster's tone, his terse and 



20 THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

pungent force of compressed rhetoric, will be 
found equally difficult to trace in any of these 
three plays. "Northward Ho!" a clever, coarse, 
and vigorous study of the realistic sort, has not a 
note of poetry in it, but is more coherent, more 
sensibly conceived and more ably constructed, 
than the rambling history of Wyatt or the hybrid 
amalgam of prosaic and romantic elements in the 
compound comedy of " Westward Ho!" All that 
is of any great value in this amorphous and in- 
congruous product of inventive impatience and 
impetuous idleness can be as distinctly traced to 
the hand of Dekker as the crowning glories of 
"The Two Noble Kinsmen" can be traced to the 
hand of Shakespeare. Any poet, even of his 
time, might have been proud of these verses, 
but the accent of them is unmistakable, as that 
of Dekker. 

Go, let music 
Charm with her excellent voice an awful silence 
Through all this building, that her sphery soul 
May, on the wings of air, in thousand forms 
Invisibly fly, yet be enjoyed. 

This delicate fluency and distilled refinement of 
expression ought properly, one would say, to have 
belonged to a poet of such careful and self- 
respectful genius as Tennyson's: whereas in the 
very next speech of the same speaker we stumble 



JOHN WEBSTER 21 

over such a phrase as that which closes the follow- 
ing sentence: 

We feed, wear rich attires, and strive to cleave 
The stars with marble towers, fight battles, spend 
Our blood to buy us names, and, in iron hold, 
Will we eat roots, to imprison fugitive gold. 

Which he who can parse, let him scan, and he 
who can scan, let him construe. It is alike in- 
credible and certain that the writer of such ex- 
quisite and blameless verse as that in which 
the finer scenes of "Old Fortunatus" and "The 
Honest Whore" are so smoothly and simply and 
naturally written should have been capable of 
writing whole plays in this headlong and halting 
fashion, as helpless and graceless as the action 
of a spavined horse or a cripple who should at- 
tempt to run. 

It is difficult to say what part of these plays 
should be assigned to Webster. Their rough 
realistic humor, with its tone of somewhat coarse- 
grained good-nature, strikes the habitual note of 
Dekker's comic style: there is nothing of the 
fierce and scornful intensity, the ardor of pas- 
sionate and compressed contempt, which distin- 
guishes the savagely humorous satire of Webster 
and of Marston, and makes it hopeless to deter- 
mine by intrinsic evidence how little or how much 



22 THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

was added by Webster in the second edition to 
the original text of Marston's Malcontent: unless 
— which appears to me not unreasonable — we 
assume that the printer of that edition lied or 
blundered after the manner of his contemporary 
kind in attributing on the title-page — as ap- 
parently he meant to attribute — any share in the 
additional scenes or speeches to the original au- 
thor of the play. In any case, the passages thus 
added to that grimmest and most sombre of 
tragicomedies are in such exact keeping with the 
previous text that the keenest scent of the veriest 
blood -hound among critics could not detect a 
shade of difference in the savor. 

The text of either comedy is generally very 
fair — as free from corruption as could reasonably 
be expected. The text of " Sir Thomas Wyatt " 
is corrupt as well as mutilated. Even in Mr. 
Dyce's second edition I have noted, not without 
astonishment, the following flagrant errors left 
still to glare on us from the distorted and dis- 
figured page. In the sixth scene a single speech 
of Arundel's contains two of the most palpably 
preposterous : 

The obligation wherein we all stood bound 

Cannot be concealed without great reproach 
To us and to our issue. 



JOHN WEBSTER 23 

We should of course read "cancelled" for "con- 
cealed": the sense of the context and the exi- 
gence of the verse cry alike aloud for the correc- 
tion. In the sixteenth line from this we come 
upon an equally obvious error: 

Advice in this I hold it better far, 

To keep the course we run, than, seeking change, 

Hazard our lives, our honors, and the realm. 

It seems hardly credible to those who are aware 
how much they owe to the excellent scholarship 
and editorial faculty of Mr. Dyce, that he should 
have allowed such a misprint as "heirs" for 
"honors" to stand in this last unlucky line. 
Again, in the next scene, when the popular leader 
Captain Brett attempts to reassure the country 
folk who are startled at the sight of his insurgent 
array, he is made to utter (in reply to the ex- 
clamation, "What's here? soldiers!") the per- 
fectly fatuous phrase, "Fear not good speech." 
Of course — once more — we should read, "Fear 
not, good people"; a correction which rectifies 
the metre as well as the sense. 

The play attributed to Webster and Rowley by 
a publisher of the next generation has been care- 
fully and delicately analyzed by a critic of our 
own time, who naturally finds it easy to dis- 
tinguish the finer from the homelier part of the 



24 THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

compound weft, and to assign what is rough and 
crude to the inferior, what is interesting and 
graceful to the superior poet. The authority of 
the rogue Kirkman may be likened to the out- 
line or profile of Mr. Mantalini's early loves: it 
is either no authority at all, or at best it is a 
"demd" authority. The same swindler who 
assigned to Webster and Rowley the authorship 
of "A Cure for a Cuckold" assigned to Shake- 
speare and Rowley the authorship of an infinitely 
inferior play — a play of which German sagacity 
has discovered that "none of Rowley's other 
works are equal to this." Assuredly they are 
not — in utter stolidity of platitude and absolute 
impotence of drivel. Rowley was a vigorous 
artist in comedy and an original master of trag- 
edy : he may have written the lighter or broader 
parts of the play which rather unluckily took its 
name from these, and Webster may have written 
the more serious or sentimental parts: but there 
is not the slightest shadow of a reason to suppose 
it. An obviously apocryphal abortion of the 
same date, attributed to the same poets by the 
same knave, has long since been struck off the 
roll of Webster's works. 

The few occasional poems of this great poet 
are worth study by those who are capable of feel- 
ing interest in the comparison of slighter with 



JOHN WEBSTER 25 

sublimer things, and the detection in minor works 
of the same style, here revealed by fitful hints in 
casual phrases, as that which animates and dis- 
tinguishes even a work so insufficient and incom- 
petent as Webster's " tragecomoedy " of "The 
Devil's Law-case." The noble and impressive 
extracts from this most incoherent and chaotic 
of all plays which must be familiar to all students 
of Charles Lamb are but patches of imperial 
purple sewn on with the roughest of needles to a 
garment of the raggedest and coarsest kind of 
literary serge. Hardly any praise can be too 
high for their dignity and beauty, their lofty 
loyalty and simplicity of chivalrous manhood or 
their deep sincerity of cynic meditation and self- 
contemptuous moumf ulness : and the reader who 
turns from these magnificent samples to the 
complete play must expect to find yet another 
and a yet unknown masterpiece of English 
tragedy. He will find a crowning example of the 
famous theorem, that "the plot is of no use 
except to bring in the fine things." The plot is 
in this instance absurd to a degree so far beyond 
the most preposterous conception of confused 
and distracting extravagance that the reader's 
attention may at times be withdrawn from the 
all but unqualified ugliness of its ethical tone or 
tendency. Two of Webster's favorite types, the 



26 THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

meditative murderer or philosophic ruffian, and 
the impulsive impostor who is liable to collapse 
into the likeness of a passionate penitent, will 
remind the reader how much better they appear 
in tragedies which are carried through to their 
natural tragic end. But here, where the story is 
admirably opened and the characters as skilfully 
introduced, the strong interest thus excited at 
starting is scattered or broken or trifled away 
before the action is half-way through : and at its 
close the awkward violence or irregularity of 
moral and scenical effect comes to a crowning 
crisis in the general and mutual condonation of 
unnatural perjury and attempted murder with 
which the victims and the criminals agree to hush 
up all grudges, shake hands all round, and live 
happy ever after. There is at least one point 
of somewhat repulsive resemblance between the 
story of this play and that of Fletcher's "Fair 
Maid of the Inn" : but Fletcher's play, with none 
of the tragic touches or interludes of superb and 
sombre poetry which relieve the incoherence of 
Webster's, is better laid out and constructed, 
more amusing if not more interesting, and more 
intelligent if not more imaginative. 

A far more creditable and workman-like piece 
of work, though glorified by no flashes of such 
sudden and singular beauty, is the tragedy of 



JOHN WEBSTER 27 

"Appius and Virginia." The almost infinite 
superiority of Webster to Fletcher as a poet of 
pure tragedy and a painter of masculine character 
is in this play as obvious as the inferiority in 
construction and conduct of romantic story dis- 
played in his attempt at a tragicomedy. From 
the evidence of style I should judge this play to 
have been written at an earlier date than "The 
Devil's Law-case" : it is, I repeat, far better com- 
posed; better, perhaps, than any other play of 
the author's: but it has none of his more distinc- 
tive qualities ; intensity of idea, concentration of 
utterance, pungency of expression and ardor of 
pathos. , It is written with noble and equable 
power of hand, with force and purity and fluency 
of apt and simple eloquence: there is nothing in 
it unworthy of the writer: but it is the only one 
of his unassisted works in which we do not find 
that especial note of tragic style, concise and 
pointed and tipped as it were with fire, which 
usually makes it impossible for the dullest reader 
to mistake the peculiar presence, the original 
tone or accent, of John Webster. If the epithet 
unique had not such a tang of German affectation 
in it, it would be perhaps the aptest of all ad- 
jectives to denote the genius or define the man- 
ner of this great poet. But in this tragedy, 
though whatever is said is well said and what- 



28 THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

ever is done well done, we miss that sense of 
positive and inevitable conviction, that instant 
and profound perception or impression as of im- 
mediate and indisputable truth, which is burnt 
in upon us as we read the more Websterian 
scenes of Webster's writing. We feel, in short, 
that thus it may have been ; not, as I observed at 
the opening of these notes, that thus it must 
have been. The poem does him no discredit; 
nay, it does him additional honor, as an evidence 
of powers more various and many-sided than we 
should otherwise have know^n or supposed in 
him. Indeed, the figure of Virginius is one of 
the finest types of soldierly and fatherly heroism 
ever presented on the stage: there is equal force 
of dramatic effect, equal fervor of eloquent 
passion, in the scene of his pleading before the 
senate on behalf of the claims of his suffering and 
struggling fellow-soldiers, and in the scene of his 
return to the camp after the immolation of his 
daughter. The mere theatric effect of this latter 
scene is at once so triumphant and so dignified, so 
noble in its presentation and so passionate in its 
restraint, that we feel the high justice and sound 
reason of the instinct which inspired the poet to 
prolong the action of his play so far beyond the 
sacrifice of his heroine. A comparison of Web- 
ster's Virginius with any of Fletcher's wordy war- 



JOHN WEBSTER 29 

riors will suffice to show how much nearer to 
Shakespeare than to Fletcher stands Webster as j 
a tragic or a serious dramatist. Coleridge, not 
always just to Fletcher, was not unjust in his 
remark ' ' what strange self-trumpeters and tongue 
bullies all the brave soldiers of Beaumont and 
Fletcher are"; and again almost immediately — 
"all B. and F.'s generals are pugilists, or cudgel- 
fighters, that boast of their bottom and of the 
'claret' they have shed." There is nothing of 
this in Virginius; Shakespeare himself has not 
represented with a more lofty fidelity, in the 
person of Coriolanus or of Brutus, "the high 
Roman fashion" of austere and heroic self-re- 
spect. In the other leading or dominant figure 
of this tragedy there is certainly discernible a 
genuine and thoughtful originality or freshness 
of conception; but perhaps there is also recog- 
nizable a certain inconsistency of touch. It was 
well thought of to mingle some alloy of good- 
ness with the wickedness of Appius Claudius, to 
represent the treacherous and lecherous decemvir 
as neither kindless nor remorseless, but capable 
of penitence and courage in his last hour. But 
Shakespeare, I cannot but think, would have pre- 
pared us with more care and more dexterity for 
the revelation of some such redeeming quality in 
a character which in the act immediately preced- 



30 THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

ing Webster has represented as utterly heartless 
and shameless, brutal in its hypocrisy and im- 
pudent in its brutality. 

If the works already discussed were their 
author's only claims to remembrance and honor, 
they might not suffice to place him on a higher 
level among our tragic poets than that occupied 
by Marston and Dekker and Middleton on the 
one hand, by Fletcher and Massinger and Shirley 
on the other. ' ' Antonio and Mellida, ' ' ' ' Old Fort- 
unatus," or "The Changeling" — "The Maid's 
Tragedy," "The Duke of Milan," or "The 
Traitor" — ^would suffice to counterweigh (if not, 
in some cases, to outbalance) the merit of the 
best among these : the fitful and futile inspiration 
of "The Devil's Law-case," and the stately but 
subdued inspiration of "Appius and Virginia." 
That his place was with no subordinate poet — 
that his station is at Shakespeare's right hand — • 
the evidence supplied by his two great tragedies 
is disputable by no one who has an inkling of 
the qualities which confer a right to be named 
in the same day with the greatest writer of all 
time. 

^schylus is above all things the poet of right- 
eousness. "But in any wise, I say unto thee, 
revere thou the altar of righteousness ' ' : this is 
the crowning admonition of his doctrine, as its 



JOHN WEBSTER 31 

crowning prospect is the reconciliation or atone- 
ment of the principle of retribution with the 
principle of redemption, of the powers of the 
mystery of darkness with the coetemal forces of 
the spirit of wisdom, of the lord of inspiration 
and of light. The doctrine of Shakespeare, where 
it is not vaguer, is darker in its implication of 
injustice, in its acceptance of accident, than the 
impression of the doctrine of ^schylus. Fate, 
irreversible and inscrutable, is the only force of 
which we feel the impact, of which we trace the 
sign, in the upshot of " Othello " or " King Lear." 
The last step into the darkness remained to be 
taken by "the most tragic" of all English poets. 
With Shakespeare — and assuredly not with .^s- 
chylus — righteousness itself seems subject and 
subordinate to the masterdom of fate: but fate 
itself, in the tragic world of Webster, seems mere- 
ly the servant or the synonyme of chance. The 
two chief agents in his two great tragedies pass 
away — the phrase was, perhaps, unconsciously 
repeated — "in a mist": perplexed, indomitable, 
defiant of hope and fear; bitter and sceptical 
and bloody in penitence or impenitence alike. 
And the mist which encompasses the departing 
spirits of these moody and mocking men of 
blood seems equally to involve the lives of their 
chastisers and their victims. Blind accident and 



32 THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

blundering mishap — "such a mistake," says one 
of the criminals, "as I have often seen in a play" 
— are the steersmen of their fortunes and the 
doomsmen of their deeds. The effect of this 
method or the result of this view, whether adopt- 
ed for dramatic objects or ingrained in the 
writer's temperament, is equally fit for pure 
tragedy and unfit for any form of drama not 
purely tragic in evolution and event. In "The 
Devil's Law-case" it is offensive, because the 
upshot is incongruous and insufficient: in "The 
White Devil" and "The Duchess of Malfy" it is 
admirable, because the results are adequate and 
coherent. But in all these three plays alike, 
and in these three plays only, the peculiar tone 
of Webster's genius, the peculiar force of his 
imagination, is distinct and absolute in its ful- 
ness of effect. The author of " Appius and Vir- 
ginia" would have earned an honorable and en- 
during place in the history of English letters as 
a worthy member — one among many — of a great 
school in poetry, a deserving representative of a 
great epoch in literature : but the author of these 
three plays has a solitary station, an indisputable 
distinction of his own. The greatest poets of all 
time are not more mutually independent than 
this one — a lesser poet only than those greatest 
— is essentially independent of them all. 



JOHN WEBSTER 33 

The first quality which all readers recognize, 
and which may strike a superficial reader as the 
exclusive or excessive note of his genius and his 
work, is of course his command of terror. Except 
in iEschylus, in Dante, and in Shakespeare, I at 
least know not where to seek for passages which 
in sheer force of tragic and noble horror — to the 
vulgar shock of ignoble or brutal horror he never 
condescends to submit his reader or subdue his 
inspiration — may be set against the subtlest, 
the deepest, the sublimest passages of Webster, 
Other gifts he had as great in themselves, as 
precious and as necessary to the poet: but on 
this side he is incomparable and unique. Neither 
Marlowe nor Shakespeare had so fine, so accu- 
rate, so infallible a sense of the delicate line of de- 
marcation which divides the impressive and the 
terrible from the horrible and the loathsome — 
Victor Hugo and Honore de Balzac from Eugene 
Sue and Emile Zola. On his theatre we find no 
presentation of old men with their beards torn 
off and their eyes gouged out, of young men im- 
prisoned in reeking cesspools and impaled with 
red-hot spits. Again and again his passionate 
and daring genius attains the utmost limit and 
rounds the final goal of tragedy ; never once does 
it break the bounds of pure poetic instinct. If 
ever for a moment it may seem to graze that goal 



34 THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

too closely, to brush too sharply by those bounds, 
the very next moment finds it clear of any such 
risk and remote from any such temptation as 
sometimes entrapped or seduced the foremost 
of its forerunners in the field. And yet this is 
the field in which its paces are most superbly 
shown. No name among all the names of great 
poets will recur so soon as Webster's to the reader 
who knows what it signifies, as he reads or re- 
peats the verses in which a greater than this 
great poet — a greater than all since Shakes- 
peare — has expressed the latent mystery of ter- 
ror which lurks in all the highest poetry or 
beauty, and distinguishes it inexplicably and 
inevitably from all that is but a little lower than 
the highest. 

Les aigles sur les bords du Gange et du Caystre 

Sont efifrayants; 
Rien de grand qui ne soit confusement sinistre; 

Les noirs pseans, 

Les psaumes, la chanson monstrueuse du mage 

Ezechiel, 
Font devant notre oeil fixe errer la vague image 

D'un afifreux ciel. 

L'empyree est I'abime, on y plonge, on y reste 

Avec terreur. 
Car planer, c'est trembler; si I'azur est celeste, 

C'est par I'horreur. 



JOHN WEBSTER 35 

L'epouvante est au fond des choses les plus belles ; 

Les bleus vallons 
Font parfois reculer d'effroi les fauves ailes 

Des aquilons. 

And even in comedy as in tragedy, in prosaic 
even as in prophetic inspiration, in imitative as in 
imaginative works of genius, the sovereign of 
modern poets has detected the same touch of 
terror wherever the deepest note possible has 
been struck, the fullest sense possible of genuine 
and peculiar power conveyed to the student of 
lyric or dramatic, epic or elegiac masters. 

De la tant de beautes difformes dans leurs oeuvres ; 

Le vers charmant 
Est par la torsion subite des cotdeuvres 

Pris brusquement; 

A de certains moments toutes les jeunes flores 

Dans la foret 
Ont peur, et sur le front des blanches metaphores 

L'ombre apparait; 

C'est qu'Horace ou Virgile ont vu soudain le spectre 

Noir se dresser; 
C'est que la-bas, derriere Amaryllis, Electre 

Vient de passer. 

Nor was it the Electra of Sophocles, the calm 
and impassive accomplice of an untroubled and 
unhesitating matricide, who showed herself ever 



36 THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

in passing to the intent and serious vision of 
Webster. By those candid and sensible judges 
to whom the praise of Marlowe seems to imply a 
reflection on the fame of Shakespeare, I may be 
accused — and by such critics I am content to 
be accused — of a fatuous design to set Webster 
beside Sophocles, or Sophocles — for aught I 
know — beneath Webster, if I venture to indicate 
the superiority in truth of natural passion — and, 
I must add, of moral instinct — which distin- 
guishes the modem from the ancient. It is not, 
it never will be, and it never can have been 
natural for noble and civilized creatures to ac- 
cept with spontaneous complacency, to discharge 
with unforced equanimity, such offices or such 
duties as weigh so lightly on the spirit of the 
Sophoclean Orestes that the slaughter of a 
mother seems to be a less serious undertaking for 
his unreluctant hand than the subsequent execu- 
tion of her paramour. The immeasurable supe- 
riority of ^schylus to his successors in this 
quality of instinctive righteousness — if a word 
long vulgarized by theology may yet be used in 
its just and natural sense — is shared no less by 
Webster than by Shakespeare. The grave and 
deep truth of natural impulse is never ignored 
by these poets when dealing either with innocent 
or with criminal passion : but it surely is now and 



JOHN WEBSTER 37 

then ignored by the artistic quietism of Sophocles 
— as surely as it is outraged and degraded by 
the vulgar theatricalities of Euripides. Thomas 
Campbell was amused and scandalized by the 
fact that Webster (as he is pleased to express it) 
modestly compares himself to the playwright 
last mentioned ; being apparently of opinion that 
"Hippolytus" and "Medea" may be reckoned 
equal or superior, as works of tragic art or ex- 
amples of ethical elevation, to "The White 
Devil" and "The Duchess of Malfy"; and being 
no less apparently ignorant, and incapable of 
understanding, that as there is no poet morally 
nobler than Webster so is there no poet igno- 
bler in the moral sense than Euripides: while 
as a dramatic artist — an artist in character, ac- 
tion, and emotion — the degenerate tragedian of 
Athens, compared to the second tragic dramatist 
of England, is as a mutilated monkey to a well- 
made man. No better test of critical faculty 
could be required by the most exacting scrutiny 
of probation than is afforded by the critic's pro- 
fessed or professional estimate of those great poets 
whose names are not consecrated — or desecrated 
— by the conventional applause, the factitious 
adoration, of a tribunal whose judgments are 
dictated by obsequious superstition and unani- 
mous incompetence. When certain critics inform 



38 THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

a listening world that they do not admire Mar- 
lowe and Webster — they admire Shakespeare and 
Milton, we know at once that it is not the genius 
of Shakespeare — it is the reputation of Shake- 
speare that they admire. It is not the man that 
they bow down to : it is the bust that they crouch 
down before. They would worship Shirley as 
soon as Shakespeare — Glover as soon as Milton — 
Byron as soon as Shelley — Ponsard as soon as 
Hugo — Longfellow as soon as Tennyson — if the 
tablet were as showily emblazoned, the inscrip- 
tion as pretentiously engraved. 

The nobility of spirit and motive which is so 
distinguishing a mark of Webster's instinctive 
genius or natural disposition of mind is proved by 
his treatment of facts placed on record by con- 
temporary annalists in the tragic story of Vittoria 
Accoramboni, Duchess of Bracciano. That story 
would have been suggestive, if not tempting, to 
any dramatic poet: and almost any poet but 
Shakespeare or Webster would have been con- 
tent to accept the characters and circumstances 
as they stood nakedly on record, and adapt them 
to the contemporary stage of England with such 
dexterity and intelligence as he might be able to 
command. But, as Shakespeare took the savage 
legend of Hamlet, the brutal story of Othello, 
and raised them from the respective levels of the 



JOHN WEBSTER 39 

Heimskringla and the Newgate Calendar to the 
very highest "heaven of invention," so has Web- 
ster transmuted the impressive but repulsive 
record of villanies and atrocities, in which he dis- 
covered the motive for a magnificent poem, into 
the majestic and pathetic masterpiece which is 
one of the most triumphant and the most mem- 
orable achievements of English poetry. If, in 
his play, as in the legal or historic account of the 
affair, the whole family of the heroine had appear- 
ed unanimous and eager in complicity with her 
sins and competition for a share in the profits 
of her dishonor, the tragedy might still have been 
as effective as it is now from the theatrical or 
sensational point of view; it might have thrilled 
the reader's nerves as keenly, have excited and 
stimulated his curiosity, have whetted and 
satiated his appetite for transient emotion, as 
thoroughly and triumphantly as now. But it 
would have been merely a criminal melodrama, 
compiled by the labor and vivified by the tal- 
ent of an able theatrical journeyman. The one 
great follower of Shakespeare — " haud passibus 
sequis" at all points; "longo sed proximus inter- 
vallo" — ^has recognized, with Shakespearean ac- 
curacy and delicacy and elevation^ of instinct, 
the necessity of ennobling and transfiguring his 
characters if their story was to be made accept- 



40 THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

able to the sympathies of any but an idle or an 
ignoble audience. And he has done so after the 
very manner and in the very spirit of Shakespeare. 
The noble creatures of his invention give to the 
story that dignity and variety of interest without 
which the most powerful romance or drama can 
be but an example of vigorous vulgarity. The 
upright and high-minded mother and brother of 
the shameless Flamineo and the shame-stricken 
Vittoria refresh and purify the tragic atmosphere 
of the poem by the passing presence of their 
virtues. The shallow and fiery nature of the 
fair White Devil herself is a notable example of 
the difference so accurately distinguished by 
Charlotte Bronte between an impressionable and 
an impressible character. Ambition, self-inter- 
est, passion, remorse, and hardihood alternate 
and contend in her impetuous and wayward 
spirit. The one distinct and trustworthy quality 
which may always be reckoned on is the in- 
domitable courage underlying her easily irritable 
emotions. Her bearing at the trial for her hus- 
band's murder is as dexterous and dauntless as 
the demeanor of Mary Stuart before her judges. 
To Charles Lamb it seemed "an innocence-re- 
sembling boldness"; to Mr. Dyce and Canon 
Kingsley the innocence displayed in Lamb's 
estimate seemed almost ludicrous in its miscon- 



JOHN WEBSTER 41 

ception of Webster's text. I should hesitate to 
agree with them that he has never once made his 
accused heroine speak in the natural key of in- 
nocence unjustly impeached : Mary's pleading for 
her life is not at all points incompatible in tone 
with the innocence which it certainly fails to es- 
tablish — except in minds already made up to 
accept any plea as valid which may plausibly or 
possibly be advanced on her behalf ; and the argu- 
ments advanced by Vittoria are not more evasive 
and equivocal, in face of the patent and flagrant 
prepossession of her judges, than those put for- 
ward by the Queen of Scots. It is impossible 
not to wonder whether the poet had not in his 
mind the actual tragedy which had taken place 
just twenty-five years before the publication of 
this play: if not, the coincidence is something 
more than singular. The fierce profligacy and 
savage egotism of Brachiano have a certain 
energy and activity in the display and the de- 
velopment of their motives and effects which sug- 
gest rather such a character as Both well's than 
such a character as that of the bloated and stolid 
sensualist who stands or grovels before us in the 
historic record of his life. As presented by Web- 
ster, he is doubtless an execrable ruffian: as pre- 
sented by history, he would be intolerable by any 
but such readers or spectators as those on whom 



42 THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

the figments or the photographs of self-styled 
naturalism produce other than emetic emotions. 
Here again the noble instinct of the English poet 
has rectified the aesthetic unseemliness of an 
ignoble reality. This " Brachiano" is a far more 
living figure than the porcine paramour of the 
historic Accoramboni. I am not prepared to 
maintain that in one scene too much has not been 
sacrificed to immediate vehemence of effect. The 
devotion of the discarded wife, who to shelter her 
Antony from the vengeance of Octavius assumes 
the mask of raging jealousy, thus taking upon 
herself the blame and responsibility of their final 
separation, is expressed with such consummate 
and artistic simplicity of power that on a first 
reading the genius of the dramatist may well 
blind us to the violent unlikelihood of the action. 
But this very extravagance of self-sacrifice may 
be thought by some to add a crowning touch of 
pathos to the unsurpassable beauty of the scene 
in which her child, after the murder of his moth- 
er, relates her past sufferings to his uncle. Those 
to whom the great name of Webster represents 
merely an artist in horrors, a ruf^an of genius, 
may be recommended to study every line and 
syllable of this brief dialogue : 

Francisco. How now, my noble cousin? what, in 
black? 



JOHN WEBSTER 43 

Giovanni. Yes, uncle, I was taught to imitate you 
In virtue, and you [? now] must imitate me 
In colors of your garments. My sweet mother 
Is— 

Francisco. How! where? 

Giovanni. Is there; no, yonder: indeed, sir, I'll not 
tell you, 
For I shall make you weep. 

Francisco. Is dead? 

Giovanni. Do not blame me now, 

I did not tell you so. 

Lodovico. She's dead, my lord. 

Francisco. Dead! 

Monticelso. Blest lady, thou art now above 

thy woes! 

Giovanni. What do the dead do, uncle? do they 
eat, 
Hear music, go a-hunting, and be merry. 
As we that live? 

Francisco. No, coz; they sleep. 

Giovanni. Lord, Lord, that I were dead! 

I have not slept these six nights. — When do they 
wake? 

Francisco. When God shall please. 

Giovanni. Good God, let her sleep ever! 

For I have known her wake an hundred nights 
When all the pillow where she laid her head 
Was brine-wet with her tears. I am to complain to 

you, sir; 
I'll tell you how they have used her now she's dead: 
They wrapped her in a cruel fold of lead, 
And would not let me kiss her. 

Francisco. Thou didst love her. 

Giovanni. I have often heard her say she gave me 
suck, 



44 THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

And it should seem by that she dearly loved me, 
Since princes seldom do it. 

Francisco. O, all of my poor sister that remains! — 
Take him away, for God's sake! 

I must admit that I do not see how Shake- 
speare could have improved upon that. It 
seems to me that in any one of even his greatest 
tragedies this scene would have been remarkable 
among its most beautiful and perfect passages; 
nor, upon the whole, do I remember a third 
English poet who could be imagined capable of 
having written it. And it affords, I think, very 
clear and sufficient evidence that Webster could 
not have handled so pathetic and suggestive a 
subject as the execution of Lady Jane Grey and 
her young husband in a style so thin and feeble, 
so shallow in expression of pathos and so empty 
of suggestion or of passion, as that in which it is 
presented at the close of "Sir Thomas Wyatt." 

There is a perfect harmony of contrast between 
this and the death scene of the boy's father: the 
agony of the murdered murderer is as superb in 
effect of terror as the sorrow of his son is exquisite 
in effect of pathos. Again we are reminded of 
Shakespeare, by no touch of imitation but simply 
by a note of kinship in genius and in style, at the 
cry of Brachiano under the first sharp workings 
of the poison: 



JOHN WEBSTER 45 

O thou strong heart! 
There's such a covenant 'tween the world and it, 
They're loath to break. 



Another stroke well worthy of Shakespeare is the 
redeeming touch of grace in this brutal and cold- 
blooded ruffian which gives him in his agony a 
thought of tender care for the accomplice of his 
atrocities : 

Do not kiss me, for I shall poison thee. 

Few instances of Webster's genius are so well 
known as the brief but magnificent passage which 
follows; yet it may not be impertinent to cite it 
once again: 

Brachiano. O thou soft natural death, that art joint 
twin 
To sweetest slumber! no rough-bearded comet 
Stares on thy mild departure; the dull owl 
Beats not against thy casement; the hoarse wolf 
Scents not thy carrion; pity winds thy corpse, 
Whilst horror waits on princes. 

Vittoria. I am lost forever. 

Brachiano. How miserable a thing it is to die 
'Mongst women howling! — What are those? 

Flaniineo. Franciscans: 

They have brought the extreme unction. 

Brachiano. On pain of death, let no man name death 
to me; 
It is a word [? most] infinitely terrible. 



46 THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

The very tremor of moral and physical abjection 
from nervous defiance into prostrate fear which 
seems to pant and bluster and quail and subside 
in the natural cadence of these lines would suffice 
to prove the greatness of the artist who could 
express it with such terrible perfection : but when 
we compare it, by collation of the two scenes, with 
the deep simplicity of tenderness, the child-like 
accuracy of innocent emotion, in the passage pre- 
viously cited, it seems to me that we must admit, 
as an unquestionable truth, that in the deepest 
and highest and purest qualities of tragic poetry 
Webster stands nearer to Shakespeare than any 
other English poet stands to Webster; and so 
much nearer as to be a good second; while it is 
at least questionable whether even Shelley can 
reasonably be accepted as a good third. Not one 
among the predecessors, contemporaries, or suc- 
cessors of Shakespeare and Webster has given 
proof of this double faculty — this coequal mastery 
of terror and pity, undiscolored and undistorted, 
but vivified and glorified, by the splendor of im- 
mediate and infallible imagination. The most 
grovelling realism could scarcely be so impudent 
in stupidity as to pretend an aim at more perfect 
presentation of truth : the most fervent fancy, the 
most sensitive taste, could hardly dream of a 
desire for more exquisite expression of natural 



JOHN WEBSTER 47 

passion in a form of utterance more naturally- 
exalted and refined. 

In all the vast and voluminous records of crit- 
ical error there can be discovered no falsehood 
more foolish or more flagrant than the vulgar 
tradition which represents this high-souled and 
gentle-hearted poet as one morbidly fascinated 
by a fantastic attraction toward the "violent 
delights " of horror and the nervous or sensational 
excitements of criminal detail ; nor can there be 
conceived a more perverse or futile misappre- 
hension than that which represents John Webster 
as one whose instinct led him by some obscure 
and oblique propensity to darken the darkness of 
southern crime or vice by an infusion of northern 
seriousness, of introspective cynicism and re- 
flective intensity in wrong-doing, into the easy 
levity and infantile simplicity of Spontaneous 
wickedness which distinguished the moral and so- 
cial corruption of renascent Italy. Proof enough 
of this has already been adduced to make any 
protestation or appeal against such an esti- 
mate as preposterous in its superfluity as the 
misconception just mentioned is preposterous in 
its perversity. The great if not incomparable 
power displayed in Webster's delineation of such 
criminals as Flamineo and Bosola — Bonapartes 
in the bud, Napoleons in a nutshell, Caesars who 



48 THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

have missed their Rubicon and collapse into the 
likeness of a Catiline — is a sign rather of his noble 
English loathing for the traditions associated 
with such names as Caesar and Medici and Bor- 
gia, Catiline and Iscariot and Napoleon, than of 
any sympathetic interest in such incarnations of 
historic crime. Flamineo especially, the ardent 
pimp, the enthusiastic pandar, who prostitutes 
his sister and assassinates his brother with such 
earnest and single-hearted devotion to his own 
straightforward self-interest, has in him a sublime 
fervor of rascality which recalls rather the man 
of Brumaire and of Waterloo than the man of 
December and of Sedan. He has something too 
of Napoleon's ruffianly good-humor — the frank- 
ness of a thieves' kitchen or an imperial court, 
when the last thin fig-leaf of pretence has been 
plucked off and crumpled up and flung away. 
We can imagine him pinching his favorites by 
the ear and dictating memorials of mendacity 
with the self-possession of a self-made monarch. 
As it is, we see him only in the stage of parasite 
and pimp — more like the hired husband of a cast- 
off Creole than the resplendent rogue who fas- 
cinated even history for a time by the clamor 
and glitter of his triumphs. But the fellow is un- 
mistakably an emperor in the egg — so dauntless 
and frontless in the very abjection of his villany 



JOHN WEBSTER 49 

that we feel him to have been defrauded by mis- 
chance of the only two destinations appropriate 
for the close of his career — a gibbet or a throne. 
This imperial quality of ultimate perfection in 
egotism and crowning complacency in crime is 
wanting to his brother in atrocity, the most nota- 
ble villain who figures on the stage of Webster's 
latest masterpiece. Bosola is not quite a possi- 
ble Bonaparte ; he is not even on a level with the 
bloody hirelings who execute the orders of tyr- 
anny and treason with the perfunctory atrocity 
of Anicetus or Saint-Amaud. There is not, or I 
am much mistaken, a touch of imaginative poetry 
in the part of Flamineo : his passion, excitable on 
occasion and vehement enough, is as prosaic in its 
homely and cynical eloquence as the most fervent 
emotions of a Napoleon or an lago when warmed 
or goaded into elocution. The one is a human 
snake, the other is a human wolf. Webster could 
not with equal propriety have put into the mouth 
of Flamineo such magnificent lyric poetry as 
seems to fall naturally, however suddenly and 
strangely, from the bitter and blood-thirsty 
tongue of Bosola. To him, as to the baffled and 
incoherent ruffian Romelio in the contemporary 
play of "The Devil's Law-case," his creator has 
assigned the utterance of such verse as can only 
be compared to that uttered by Cornelia over 



56 THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

the body of her murdered son in the tragedy to 
which I have just given so feeble and inadequate 
a word of tribute. In his command and in 
his use of the metre first made fashionable by 
the graceful improvisations of Greene, Webster 
seems to me as original and as peculiar as in his 
grasp and manipulation of character and event. 
All other poets, Shakespeare no less than Barn- 
field and Milton no less than Wither, have used 
this lyric instrument for none but gentle or 
gracious ends : Webster has breathed into it the 
power to express a sublimer and a profounder 
tone of emotion ; he has given it the cadence and 
the color of tragedy; he has touched and trans- 
figured its note of meditative music into a chord 
of passionate austerity and prophetic awe. This 
was the key in which all previous poets had 
played upon the metre which Webster was to put 
to so deeply different an use : 

Walking in a valley greene, 
Spred with Flora summer queene: 
Where shee heaping all hir graces, 
Niggard seem'd in other places: 
Spring it was, and here did spring 
All that nature forth can bring. 

{Tullies Loue, p. 53, ed. 1589.) 

Nights were short, and daies were long; 
Blossoms on the Hauthoms hung: 



JOHN WEBSTER gi 

Philomele (Night-Musiques King) 
Tolde the comming of the spring. 

{Gr OS art's Barn field [1876], p. 97.) 

On a day (alack the day!) 
Love, whose month is ever May, 
Spied a blossom passing fair 
Playing in the wanton air. 

(Love's Labor's Lost, act iv., so. iii.) 



And now let us hear Webster. 

Hearke, now every thing is still, 
The Scritch-Owle, and the whistler shrill. 
Call upon our Dame, aloud, 
And bid her quickly don her shrowd: 
Much you had of Land and rent, 
Your length in clay 's now competent. 
A long war disturb'd your minde, 
Here your perfect peace is sign'd. 
Of what is 't, fooles make such vaine keeping ? 
Sin their conception, their birth, weeping: 
Their life, a generall mist of error. 
Their death, a hideous storme of terror. 
Strew your haire with powders sweete: 
Don cleane linnen, bath[e] your feete, 
And (the fotile feend more to checke) 
A crucifixe let blesse your necke: 
'Tis now full tide 'tweene night and day, 
End your groane, and come away. 
{The Tragedy of the Dutchesse of Malfy: 1623: sig. 
K, K 2.) 

The toll of the funereal rhythm, the heavy 
chime of the solemn and simple verse, the mourn- 



52 THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

ful menace and the brooding presage of its note, 
are but the covering, as it were, or the outer 
expression, of the tragic significance which deep- 
ens and quickens and kindles to its close, 
^schylus and Dante have never excelled, nor 
perhaps have Sophocles and Shakespeare ever 
equalled in impression of terrible effect, the fancy 
of bidding a live woman array herself in the rai- 
ment of the grave, and do for her own living body 
the offices done for a corpse by the ministers at- 
tendant on the dead. 

The murderous humorist whose cynical in- 
spiration gives life to these deadly lines is at first 
sight a less plausible, but on second thoughts may 
perhaps seem no less possible a character than 
Flamineo. Pure and simple ambition of the 
Napoleonic order is the motive which impels into 
infamy the aspiring parasite of Brachiano: a 
savage melancholy inflames the baffled greed of 
Bosola to a pitch of wickedness not unqualified 
by relenting touches of profitless remorse, which 
come always either too early or too late to bear 
any serviceable fruit of compassion or redemp- 
tion. There is no deeper or more Shakespearean 
stroke of tragic humor in all Webster's writings 
than that conveyed in the scornful and acute 
reply — almost too acute perhaps for the character 
— of Bosola's remorseless patron to the remon- 



JOHN WEBSTER 53 

strance or appeal of his instrument against the 
insatiable excess and persistence of his cruelty: 
"Thy pity is nothing akin to thee." He has 
more in common with Romelio in "The Devil's 
Law-case," an assassin who misses his aim and 
flounders into penitence much as that discom- 
fortable drama misses its point and stumbles into 
vacuity: and whose unsatisfactory figure looks 
either like a crude and unsuccessful study for 
that of Bosola, or a disproportioned and emas- 
culated copy from it. But to him too Webster 
has given the fitful force of fancy or inspiration 
which finds expression in such sudden snatches 
of funereal verse as this: 

How then can any monument say 
"Here rest these bones till the last day," 
When Time, swift both of foot and feather, 
May bear them the sexton kens not whither? 
What care I, then, though my last sleep 
Be in the desert or the deep. 
No lamp nor taper, day and night, 
To give my charnel chargeable light? 
I have there like quantity of ground, 
And at the last day I shall be found. 

The villanous laxity of versification which de- 
forms the grim and sardonic beauty of these oc- 
casionally rough and halting lines is perceptible 
here and there in "The Duchess of Malfy," but 
comes to its head in "The Devil's Law-case," It 



54 THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

cannot, I fear, be denied that Webster was the 
first to relax those natural bonds of noble metre 
"whose service is perfect freedom" — as Shake- 
speare found it, and combined with perfect 
loyalty to its law the most perfect liberty of 
living and sublime and spontaneous and accu- 
rate expression. I can only conjecture that this 
greatest of the Shakespeareans was misguided 
out of his natural line of writing as exemplified 
and perfected in the tragedy of Vittoria, and 
lured into this cross and crooked by-way of im- 
metrical experiment, by the temptation of some 
theory or crotchet on the score of what is now 
called naturalism or realism ; which, if there were 
any real or natural weight in the reasoning that 
seeks to support it, would of course do away, 
and of course ought to do away, with dramatic 
poetry altogether: for if it is certain that real 
persons do not actually converse in good metre, 
it is happily no less certain that they do not 
actually converse in bad metre. In the hands of 
so great a tragic poet as Webster a peculiar and 
impressive effect may now and then be produced 
by this anomalous and illegitimate way of writ- 
ing; it certainly suits well with the thoughtful 
and fantastic truculence of Bosola's reflections on 
death and dissolution and decay — his "talk fit 
for a chamel," which halts and hovers between 



JOHN WEBSTER 55 

things hideous and things sublime. But it is a 
step on the downward way that leads to the nega- 
tion or the confusion of all distinctions between 
poetry and prose; a result to which it would be 
grievous. to think that the example of Shake- 
speare's greatest contemporary should in any 
way appear to conduce. 

The doctrine or the motive of chance (which- 
ever we may prefer to call it) is seen in its fullest 
workings and felt in its furthest bearings by the 
student of Webster's masterpiece. The fifth act 
of "The Duchess of Malfy" has been assailed on 
the very ground which it should have been evi- 
dent to a thoughtful and capable reader that the 
writer must have intended to take up — on the 
ground that the whole upshot of the story is 
dominated by sheer chance, arranged by mere 
error, and guided by pure accident. No formal 
scheme or religious principle of retribution would 
have been so strangely or so thoroughly in keep- 
ing with the whole scheme and principle of the 
tragedy. After the overwhelming terrors and 
the overpowering beauties of that unique and 
marvellous fourth act, in which the genius of this 
poet spreads its fullest and its darkest wing for 
the longest and the strongest of its flights, it 
could not but be that the subsequent action and 
passion of the drama should appear by com- 



S6 THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

parison unimpressive or ineffectual; but all the 
effect or impression possible of attainment under 
the inevitable burden of this difficulty is achieved 
by natural and simple and straightforward means. 
If Webster has not made the part of Antonio 
dramatically striking and attractive — as he prob- 
ably found it impossible to do — he has at least 
bestowed on the fugitive and unconscious wid- 
ower of his murdered heroine a pensive and 
manly grace of deliberate resignation which is 
not without pathetic as well as poetical effect. 
In the beautiful and well-known scene where the 
echo from his wife's unknown and new-made 
grave seems to respond to his meditative mock- 
ery and forewarn him of his impending death, 
Webster has given such reality and seriousness 
to an old commonplace of contemporary fancy 
or previous fashion in poetry that we are fain to 
forget the fantastic side of the conception and 
see only the tragic aspect of its meaning. A 
weightier objection than any which can be 
brought against the conduct of the play might be 
suggested to the minds of some readers — and 
these, perhaps, not too exacting or too captious 
readers — by the sudden vehemence of transforma- 
tion which in the great preceding act seems to fall 
like fire from heaven upon the two chief criminals 
who figure on the stage of murder. It seems 



JOPIN WEBSTER 57 

rather a miraculous retribution, a judicial viola- 
tion of the laws of nature, than a reasonably 
credible consequence or evolution of those laws, 
which strikes Ferdinand with madness and Bosola 
with repentance. But the whole atmosphere of 
the action is so charged with thunder that this 
double and simultaneous shock of moral elec- 
tricity rather thrills us with admiration and 
faith than chills us with repulsion or distrust. 
The passionate intensity and moral ardor of 
imagination which we feel to vibrate and pene- 
trate through every turn and every phrase of the 
dialogue would suffice to enforce upon our belief 
a more nearly incredible revolution of nature or 
revulsion of the soul. 

It is so difficult for even the very greatest poets 
to give any vivid force of living interest to a figure 
of passive endurance that perhaps the only in- 
stance of perfect triumph over this difficulty is 
to be found in the character of Desdemona. 
Shakespeare alone could have made her as in- 
teresting as Imogen or Cordelia; though these 
have so much to do and dare, and she after her 
first appearance has simply to suffer: even Web- 
ster could not give such individual vigor of 
characteristic life to the figure of his martyr as to 
the figure of his criminal heroine. Her courage 

and sweetness, her delicacy and sincerity, her 
5 



58 THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

patience and her passion, are painted with equal 
power and tenderness of touch: yet she hardly 
stands before us as distinct from others of her 
half-angelic sisterhood as does the White Devil 
from the fellowship of her comrades in perdition. 
But if, as we may assuredly assume, it was 
on the twenty- third "nouell" of William Pain- 
ter's Palace of Pleasure that Webster's crowning 
masterpiece was founded, the poet's moral and 
spiritual power of transfiguration is here even 
more admirable than in the previous case of his 
other and wellnigh coequally consummate poem. 
The narrative degrades and brutalizes the wid- 
owed heroine's affection for her second husband 
to the actual level of the vile conception which 
the poet attributes and confines to the foul imag- 
ination of her envious and murderous brothers. 
Here again, and finally and supremely here, the 
purifying and exalting power of Webster's noble 
and magnanimous imagination is gloriously un- 
mistakable by all and any who have eyes to read 
and hearts to recognize. 

For it is only with Shakespeare that Webster 
can ever be compared in any way to his dis- 
advantage as a tragic poet: above all others of 
his country he stands indisputably supreme. The 
place of Marlowe indeed is higher among our 
poets by right of his primacy as a founder and a 



JOHN WEBSTER 59 

pioneer: but of course his work has not — as of 
course it could not have — that plenitude and per- 
fection of dramatic power in construction and 
dramatic subtlety in detail which the tragedies of 
Webster share in so large a measure with the 
tragedies of Shakespeare. Marston, the poet with 
whom he has most in common, might almost be 
said to stand in the same relation to Webster as 
Webster to Shakespeare. In single lines and 
phrases, in a few detached passages and a very- 
few distinguishable scenes, he is worthy to be com- 
pared with the greater poet; he suddenly rises 
and dilates to the stature and the strength of a 
model whom usually he can but follow afar off. 
Marston, as a tragic poet, is not quite what Web- 
ster would be if his fame depended simply on 
such scenes as those in which the noble mother 
of Vittoria breaks off her daughter's first inter- 
view with Brachiano — spares, and commends to 
God's forgiveness, the son who has murdered his 
brother before her eyes — and lastly appears "in 
several forms of distraction," "grown a very old 
woman in two hours," and singing that most 
pathetic and imaginative of all funereal invoca- 
tions which the finest critic of all time so justly 
and so delicately compared to the watery dirge of 
Ariel. There is less refinement, less exaltation 
and perfection of feeling, less tenderness of emo- 



6o THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

tion and less nobility of passion, but hardly less 
force and fervor, less weighty and sonorous ar- 
dor of expression, in the very best and loftiest 
passages of Marston : but his genius is more un- 
certain, more fitful and intermittent, less harmo- 
nious, coherent, and trustworthy than Webster's. 
And Webster, notwithstanding an occasional out- 
break into Aristophanic license of momentary 
sarcasm through the sardonic lips of such a 
cynical ruffian as Ferdinand or Flamineo, is 
without exception the cleanliest, as Marston is 
beyond comparison the coarsest writer of his 
time. In this as in other matters of possible 
comparison that "vessel of deathless wrath," the 
implacable and inconsolable poet of sympathy 
half maddened into rage and aspiration goaded 
backward to despair — it should be needless to 
add the name of Cyril Toumeur — stands midway 
between these two more conspicuous figures of 
their age. But neither the father and master of 
poetic pessimists, the splendid and sombre cre- 
ator of Vindice and his victims, nor any other 
third whom our admiration may discern among 
all the greatest of their fellows, can be compared 
with Webster on terms more nearly equal than 
those on which Webster stands in relation to the 
sovereign of them all. 



THOMAS DEKKER 

Of all English poets, if not of all poets oa 
record, Dekker is perhaps the most difficult to 
classify. The grace and delicacy, the sweetness 
and spontaneity of his genius are not more 
obvious and undeniable than the many defects 
which impair and the crowning deficiency which 
degrades it. As long, but so long only, as a man 
retains some due degree of self-respect and re- 
spect for the art he serves or the business he 
follows, it matters less for his fame in the future 
than for his prosperity in the present whether he 
retains or discards any vestige of respect for any 
other obligation in the world. Frangois Villon, 
compared with whom all other reckless and dis- 
reputable men of genius seem patterns of austere 
decency and elevated regularity of life, was as 
conscientious and self-respectful an artist as a 
Virgil or a Tennyson : he is not a great poet only, 
but one of the most blameless, the most perfect, 
the most faultless among his fellows in the first 
class of writers for all time. If not in that class, 



/ 



62 THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

yet high in the class immediately beneath it, 
the world would long since have agreed to enrol 
the name of Thomas Dekker, had he not wanted 
that one gift which next to genius is the most 
indispensable for all aspirants to a station among 
the masters of creative literature. For he was 
by nature at once a singer and a maker: he had 
the gift of native music and the birthright of in- 
born invention. His song was often sweet as 
honey ; his fancy sometimes as rich and subtle, his 
imagination as delicate and strong, as that of the 
very greatest among dramatists or poets. For 
gentle grace of inspiration and vivid force of real- 
ism he is eclipsed at his very best by Shake- 
speare's self alone. No such combination or 
alternation of such admirable powers is discern- 
ible in any of his otherwise more splendid or 
sublime compeers. And in one gift, the divine 
gift of tenderness, he comes nearer to Shake- 
speare and stands higher above others than in 
any other quality of kindred genius. 

And with all these gifts, if the vulgar verdict 
of his own day and of later days be not less valid 
than vulgar, he was a failure. There is a pathetic 
undertone of patience and resignation not un- 
qualified by manly though submissive regret, 
which recurs now and then, or seems to recur, in 
the personal accent of his subdued and dignified 



THOMAS DEKKER 63 

appeal to the casual reader, suggestive of a sense 
that the higher triumphs of art, the brighter pros- 
perities of achievement, were not reserved for 
him ; and yet not unsuggestive of a consciousness 
that, if this be so, it is not so through want of the 
primal and essential qualities of a poet. For, as 
Lamb says, Dekker "had poetry enough for any- 
thing"; at all events, for anything which can be 
accomplished by a poet endowed in the highest 
degree w4th the gifts of graceful and melodi- 
ous fancy, tender and cordial humor, vivid and 
pathetic realism, a spontaneous refinement and 
an exquisite simplicity of expression. With the 
one great gift of seriousness, of noble ambition, 
of self-confidence rooted in self-respect, he must 
have won an indisputable instead of a question- 
able place among the immortal writers of his age. 
But this gift had been so absolutely withheld 
from him by nature or withdrawn from him by 
circumstance that he has left us not one single 
work altogether worthy of the powers now re- 
vealed and now eclipsed, now suddenly radiant 
and now utterly extinct, in the various and 
voluminous array of 1 "s writings. Although his 
earlier plays are in every way superior to his 
later, there is evidence even in the best of them 
of the author's infirmity of hand. From the first 
he shows himself idly or perversely or impotently 



64 THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

prone to loosen his hold on character and story 
alike before his plot can be duly carried out 
or his conceptions adequately developed. His 
"pleasant Comedie of 'The Gentle Craft,'" first 
printed three years before the death of Queen 
Elizabeth, is one of his brightest and most cohe- 
/ rent pieces of work, graceful and lively through- 
out, if rather thin-spun and slight of structure: 
but the more serious and romantic part of the 
action is more lightly handled than the broad 
light comedy of the mad and merry Lord Mayor 
Simon Eyre, a figure in the main original and 
humorous enough, but somewhat over-persistent 
in ostentation and repetition of jocose catch- 
words after the fashion of mine host of the 
Garter; a type which Shakespeare knew better 
than to repeat, but of which his inferiors seem 
to have been enamoured beyond all reason. In 
this fresh and pleasant little play there are few 
or no signs of the author's higher poetic abilities : 
the style is pure and sweet, simple and spon- 
taneous, without any hint of a quality not re- 
quired by the subject: but in the other play of 
Dekker's which bears the same date as this one 
his finest and rarest gifts of imagination and emo- 
tion, feeling and fancy, color and melody, are 
as apparent as his ingrained faults of levity and 
laziness. The famous passage in which Webster 



THOMAS DEKKER 65 

couples together the names of " Mr. Shakespeare, 
Mr. Dekker, and Mr. Heywood," seems expHcable 
when we compare the style of "Old Fortunatus" 
with the style of " A Midsummer Night's Dream." 
Dekker had as much of the peculiar sweetness, 
the gentle fancy, the simple melody of Shake- 
speare in his woodland dress, as Heywood of the 
homely and noble realism, the heartiness and 
humor, the sturdy sympathy and joyful pride of 
Shakespeare in his most English mood of patri- 
otic and historic loyalty. Not that these quali- 
ties are wanting in the work of Dekker : he was 
an ardent and a combative patriot, ever ready 
to take up the cudgels in prose or rhyme for 
England and her yeomen against Popery and the 
world : but it is rather the man than the poet who 
speaks on these occasions: his singing faculty 
does not apply itself so naturally to such work 
as to the wild wood-notes of passion and fancy 
and pathos which in his happiest moments, even 
when they remind us of Shakespeare's, provoke 
no sense of unworthiness or inequality in com- 
parison with these. It is not with the most 
popular and famous names of his age that the 
sovereign name of Shakespeare is most properly 
or most profitably to be compared. His genius 
has really far less in common with that of Jonson 
or of Fletcher than with that of Webster or of 



66 THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

Dekker. To the last-named poet even Lamb 
was for once less than just when he said of the 
"frantic Lover" in "Old Fortunatus" that "he 
talks pure Biron and Romeo; he is almost as 
poetical as they." The word "almost" should 
be supplanted by the word "fully"; and the 
criticism would then be no less adequate than 
apt. Sidney himself might have applauded the 
verses which clothe with living music a passion 
as fervent and as fiery a fancy as his ow^n. Not 
even in the rapturous melodies of that matchless 
series of songs and sonnets which glorify the in- 
separable names of Astrophel and Stella will the 
fascinated student find a passage more enchant- 
ing than this: 

Thou art a traitor to that white and red 

Which sitting on her cheeks (being Cupid's throne) 
Is my heart's sovereign: O, when she is dead, 

This wonder, Beauty, shall be found in none. 
Now Agripyne's not mine, I vow to be 
In love with nothing but deformity. 
O fair Deformity, I muse all eyes 
Are not enamoured of thee: thoti didst never 
Murder men's hearts, or let them pine like wax, 
Melting against the sun of thy disdain;' 
Thou art a faithful nurse to Chastity; 

* As even Lamb allowed the meaningless and immetrical 
word "destiny" to stand at the end of this line in place of 
the obviously right reading, it is not wonderful that all later 
editors of this passage should hitherto have done so. 



THOMAS DEKKER 67 

Thy beauty is not like to Agripyne's, 

For cares, and age, and sickness, hers deface, 

But thine 's eternal: O Deformity, 

Thy fairness is not like to Agripyne's, 

For, dead, her beauty will no beauty have. 

But thy face looks most lovely in the grave. 



Shakespeare has nothing more exquisite in ex- 
pression of passionate fancy, more earnest in 
emotion, more spontaneous in simplicity, more 
perfect in romantic inspiration. But the poet's "^ 
besetting sin of laxity, his want of seriousness 
and steadiness, his idle, shambling, shifty way of 
writing, had power even then, in the very prime 
of his promise, to impede his progress and impair 
his chance of winning the race which he had set 
himself — and yet which he had hardly set him- 
self — to run. And if these things were done in 
the green tree, it was only too obvious what would 
be done in the dry ; it must have been clear that 
this golden-tongued and gentle-hearted poet had 
not strength of spirit or fervor of ambition enough 
to put conscience into his work and resolution into 
his fancies. But even from such headlong reck- 
lessness as he had already displayed no reader 
could have anticipated so singular a defiance of 
all form and order, all coherence and proportion, 
as is exhibited in his "Satiromastix." The con- 
troversial part of the play is so utterly alien from 



68 THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

the romantic part that it is impossible to regard 
them as component factors of the same original 
plot. It seems to me unquestionable that Dek- 
ker must have conceived the design, and probable 
that he must have beguii the composition, of a 
serious play on the subject of William Rufus and 
Sir Walter Tyrrel, before the appearance of Ben 
Jonson's "Poetaster" impelled or instigated him 
to some immediate attempt at rejoinder; and that 
being in a feverish hurry to retort the blow in- 
flicted on him by a heavier hand than his own he 
devised — perhaps between jest and earnest — the 
preposterously incoherent plan of piecing out his 
farcical and satirical design by patching and 
stitching it into his unfinished scheme of tragedy. 
It may be assumed, and it is much to be hoped, 
that there never existed another poet capable 
of imagining — much less of perpetrating — an in- 
congruity so monstrous and so perverse. The 
explanation so happily suggested by a modern 
critic that William Rufus is meant for Shake- 
speare, and that "Lyly is Sir Vaughan ap Rees," 
wants only a little further development, on the 
principle of analogy, to commend itself to every 
scholar. It is equally obvious that the low-bred 
and foul-mouthed ruffian Captain Tucca must be 
meant for Sir Philip Sidney; the vulgar idiot 
Asinius Bubo for Lord Bacon; the half-witted 



THOMAS DEKKER 69 

underling Peter Flash for Sir Walter Raleigh; 
and the immaculate Celcstina, who escapes by 
stratagem and force of virtue from the villanous 
designs of Shakespeare, for the lady long since 
indicated by the perspicacity of a Chalmers as 
the object of that lawless and desperate passion 
which found utterance in the sonnets of her un- 
principled admirer — Queen Elizabeth. As a pre- 
vious suggestion of my own, to the effect that 
George Peele was probably the real author of 
"Romeo and Juliet," has had the singular good- 
fortune to be not merely adopted but appro- 
priated — in serious earnest — by a contemporary 
student, without — as far as I am aware — a syl- 
lable of acknowledgment, I cannot but antici- 
pate a similar acceptance in similar quarters for 
the modest effort at interpretation now submit- 
ted to the judgment of the ingenuous reader. 

Gifford is not too severe on the palpable in- 
congruities of Dekker's preposterous medley : but 
his impeachment of Dekker as a more virulent 
and intemperate controversialist than Jonson is 
not less preposterous than the structure of this 
play. The nobly gentle and manly verses in 
which the less fortunate and distinguished poet 
disclaims and refutes the imputation of envy or 
malevolence excited by the favor enjoyed by his 
rival in high quarters should have sufficed, in 



70 THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

common justice, to protect him from such a 
charge. There is not a word in Jonson's satire 
expressive of anything but savage and unquah- 
fied scorn for his humbler antagonist: and the 
tribute paid by that antagonist to his genius, the 
appeal to his better nature which concludes the 
torrent of recrimination, would have won some 
word of honorable recognition from any but the 
most unscrupulous and ungenerous of partisans. 
That Dekker was unable to hold his own against 
Jonson when it came to sheer hard hitting — that 
on the ground or platform of personal satire he 
was as a light-weight pitted against a heavy- 
weight — is of course too plain, from the very first 
round, to require any further demonstration. 
But it is not less plain that in delicacy and sim- 
plicity and sweetness of inspiration the poet who 
could write the scene in which the bride takes 
poison (as she believes) from the hand of her 
father, in presence of her bridegroom, as a refuge 
from the passion of the king, was as far above 
Jonson as Jonson was above him in the robuster 
qualities of intellect or genius. This most lovely 
scene, for pathos tempered with fancy and for 
passion distilled in melody, is comparable only 
with higher work, of rarer composition and poetry 
more pure, than Jonson's: it is a very treasure- 
house of verses like jewels, bright as tears and 



THOMAS DEKKER 71 

sweet as flowers. When Dekkcr writes like this, 
then truly we seem to see his right hand in the 
left hand of Shakespeare. 

To find the names of Ben Jonson and Thomas 
Dekker amicably associated in the composition 
of a joint poem or pageant within the space of a 
year from the publication of so violent a retort by 
the latter to so vehement an attack by the former 
must amuse if it does not astonish the reader 
least capable of surprise at the boyish readiness 
to quarrel and the boyish readiness to shake hands 
which would seem to be implied in so startling 
a change of relations. In all the huge, costly, 
wearisome, barbaric, and pedantic ceremonial 
which welcomed into London the Solomon of 
Scotland, the exhausted student who attempts to 
follow the ponderous elaboration of report drawn 
up by these reconciled enemies will remark the 
solid and sedate merit of Jonson's best couplets 
with less pleasure than he will receive from the 
quaint sweetness of Dekker's lyric notes. Admi- 
rable as are many of Ben Jonson's songs for their 
finish of style and fulness of matter, it is impos- 
sible for those who know what is or should be the 
special aim or the distinctive quality of lyric verse 
to place him in the first class — much less, in the 
front rank — of lyric poets. He is at his best a 
good way ahead of such song- writers as Byron; 



72 THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

but Dekker at his best belongs to the order of 
such song-writers as Blake or Sheiley. Perhaps 
the very finest example of his flawless and deli- 
cate simplicity of excellence in this field of work 
may be the well-known song in honor of honest 
poverty and in praise of honest labor which so 
gracefully introduces the heroine of a play pub- 
lished in this same year of the accession of James 
'■ — "Patient Grissel"; a romantic tragicomedy so 
attractive for its sweetness and lightness of tone 
and touch that no reader will question the judg- 
ment or condemn the daring of the poets who 
ventured upon ground where Chaucer had gone 
before them with such gentle stateliness of step 
and such winning tenderness of gesture. His 
deepest note of pathos they have not even at- 
tempted to reproduce: but in freshness and 
straightforwardness, in frankness and simplicity 
of treatment, the dramatic version is not gen- 
erally unworthy to be compared with the nar- 
rative which it follows afar off.* Chettle and 

' I may here suggest a slight emendation in the text of the 
spirited and graceful scene with which this play opens. 
The original reads; 

So fares it with coy dames, who, great with scorn, 
Shew the care-pined hearts that sue to them. 

The word Shew is an obvious misprint — but more probably, 
I venture to think, for the word Shun than for the word 
Fly, which is substituted by Mr. Collier and accepted by 
Dr. Grosart. 



THOMAS DEKKER 73 

Haughton, the associates of Dekker in this en- 
terprise, had each of them something of their 
colleague's finer qualities; but the best scenes in 
the play remind me rather of Dekker's best early 
work than of "Robert, Earl of Huntington" or 
of "Englishmen for My Money." So much has 
been said of the evil influence of Italian example 
upon English character in the age of Elizabeth, 
and so much has been made of such confessions 
or imputations as distinguish the clamorous and 
malevolent penitence of Robert Greene, that it is 
more than agreeable to find at least one dramatic 
poet of the time who has the manliness to enter 
a frank and contemptuous protest against this 
habit of malignant self-excuse. "Italy," says 
an honest gentleman in this comedy to a lying 
and impudent gull, "Italy infects you not, but 
your own diseased spirits. Italy? Out, you 
froth, you scum! because your soul is mud, and 
that you have breathed in Italy, you'll say Italy 
has defiled you ; away, you boar : thou wilt wallow 
in mire in the sweetest country in the world." 

There are many traces of moral or spiritual 
weakness and infirmity in the writings of Dekker 
and the scattered records or indications of his un- 
prosperous though not unlaborious career: but 
there are manifest and manifold signs of an honest 
and earnest regard for justice and fair dealing, as 



74 THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

well as of an inexhaustible compassion for suffer- 
ing, an indestructible persistency of pity, which 
found characteristic expression in the most cele- 
brated of his plays. There is a great gulf between 
it and the first of Victor Hugo's tragedies : yet the 
instinct of either poet is the same, as surely as 
their common motive is the redemption of a 
fallen woman by the influence of twin-bom love 
and shame. Of all Dekker's works, "The Honest 
Whore" comes nearest to some reasonable de- 
gree of unity and harmony in conception and 
construction; his besetting vice of reckless and 
sluttish incoherence has here done less than usual 
to deform the proportions and deface the im- 
pression of his design. Indeed, the connection 
of the two serious plots in the first part is a rare 
example of dexterous and happy simplicity in 
composition: the comic underplot of the patient 
man and shrewish wife is more loosely attached 
by a slighter thread of relation to these two main 
stories, but is so amusing in its light and facile 
play of inventive merriment and harmless mis- 
chief as to need no further excuse. Such an 
excuse, however, might otherwise be found in the 
plea that it gives occasion for the most beautiful, 
the most serious, and the most famous passage 
in all the writings of its author. The first scene 
of this first part has always appeared to me one 



THOMAS DEKKER 



75 



of the most effective and impressive on our stage : 
the interruption of the mock funeral by the one 
true mourner whose passion it was intended to 
deceive into despair is so striking as a mere inci- 
dent or theatrical device that the noble and 
simple style in which the graver part of the dia- 
logue is written can be no more than worthy of 
the subject: whereas in other plays of Dekker's 
the style is too often beneath the merit of the 
subject, and the subject as often below the value 
of the style. The subsequent revival of Infelice 
from her trance is represented with such vivid 
and delicate power that the scene, short and 
simple as it is, is one of the most fascinating in 
any play of the period. In none of these higher 
and finer parts of the poem can I trace the touch 
of any other hand than the principal author's: 
but the shopkeeping scenes of the underplot have 
at least as much of Middleton's usual quality as 
of Dekker's ; homely and rough-cast as they are, 
there is a certain finish or thoroughness about 
them which is more like the careful realism of the 
former than the slovenly naturalism of the latter. 
The coarse commonplaces of the sermon on pros- 
titution by which Bellafront is so readily and 
surprisingly reclaimed into respectability give suf- 
ficient and superfluous proof that Dekker had 
nothing of the severe and fiery inspiration which. 



76 THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

makes a great satirist or a great preacher; but 
when we pass again into a sweeter air than that 
of the boudoir or the pulpit, it is the unmistak- 
able note of Dekker's most fervent and tender 
mood of melody which enchants us in such verses 
as these, spoken by a lover musing on the por- 
trait of a mistress whose coffin has been borne 
before him to the semblance of a grave : 

Of all the roses grafted on her cheeks, 
Of all the graces dancing in her eyes, 
Of all the music set upon her tongue, 
Of all that was past woman's excellence 
In her white bosom, look, a painted board 
Circumscribes all! 

Is there any other literature, we are tempted to 
ask ourselves, in which the writer of these lines, 
and of many as sweet and perfect in their in- 
spired simplicity as these, would be rated no 
higher among his countrymen than Thomas 
Dekker ? 

From the indisputable fact of Middleton's 
partnership in this play Mr. Dyce was induced to 
assume the very questionable inference of his 
partnership in the sequel which was licensed for 
acting five years later. To me this second part 
seems so thoroughly of one piece and one pattern, 
so apparently the result of one man's invention 
and composition, that without more positive evi- 



THOMAS DEKKER 77 

dence I should hesitate to assign a share in it to 
any colleague of the poet under whose name it 
first appeared. There are far fewer scenes or 
passages in this than in the preceding play which 
suggest or present themselves for quotation or 
selection: the tender and splendid and pensive 
touches of pathetic or imaginative poetry which 
we find in the first part, we shall be disappointed 
if we seek in the second: its incomparable claim 
on our attention is the fact that it contains the 
single character in all the voluminous and miscel- 
laneous works of Dekker which gives its creator 
an indisputable right to a place of perpetual 
honor among the imaginative humorists of Eng- 
land, and therefore among the memorable artists 
and creative workmen of the world. Apart from 
their claim to remembrance as poets and dram- 
atists of more or less artistic and executive ca- 
pacity, Dekker and Middleton are each of them 
worthy to be remembered as the inventor or dis- 
coverer of a wholly original, interesting, and nat- 
tural type of character, as essentially inimitable 
as it is undeniably unimitated : the savage humor 
and cynic passion of De Flores, the genial pas- 
sion and tender humor of Orlando Friscobaldo, 
are equally lifelike in the truthfulness and com- 
pleteness of their distinct and vivid presentation. 
The merit of the play in which the character last 



78 THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

named is a leading figure consists mainly or al- 
most wholly in the presentation of the three 
principal persons: the reclaimed harlot, now the 
faithful and patient wife of her first seducer ; the 
broken-down, ruffianly, light-hearted and light- 
headed libertine who has married her; and the 
devoted old father who watches in the disguise 
of a servant over the changes of her fortune, the 
sufferings, risks, and temptations which try the 
purity of her penitence and confirm the fortitude 
of her constancy. Of these three characters I 
cannot but think that any dramatist who ever 
lived might have felt that he had reason to be 
proud. It is strange that Charles Lamb, to 
whom of all critics and all men the pathetic and 
humorous charm of the old man's personality 
might most confidently have been expected most 
cordially to appeal, should have left to Hazlitt 
and Leigh Hunt the honor of doing justice to 
so beautiful a creation — the crowning evidence 
to the greatness of Dekker's gifts, his power of 
moral imagination and his delicacy of dramatic 
execution. From the first to the last word of 
his part the quaint sweet humor of the character 
is sustained with an instinctive skill which would 
do honor to a far more careful and a far more 
famous artist than Dekker. The words with 
which he receives the false news of his fallen 



THOMAS DEKKER 79 

daughter's death : " Dead ? my last and best peace 
go with her!" — those which he murmurs to him- 
self on seeing her again after seventeen years of 
estrangement: "The mother's own face, I ha' not 
forgot that" — prepare the way for the admirable 
final scene in which his mask of anger drops off, 
and his ostentation of obduracy relaxes into ten- 
derness and tears. " Dost thou beg for him, thou 
precious man's meat, thou ? has he not beaten 
thee, kicked thee, trod on thee? and dost thou 
fawn on him like his spaniel ? has he not pawned 
thee to thy petticoat, sold thee to thy smock, 
made ye leap at a crust? yet wouldst have me 
save him ? — What, dost thou hold him ? let go his 
hand: if thou dost not forsake him, a father's 
everlasting blessing fall upon both your heads!" 
The fusion of humor with pathos into perfection 
of exquisite accuracy in expression which must be 
recognized at once and remembered forever by 
any competent reader of this scene is the highest 
quality of Dekker as a writer of prose, and is here 
displayed at its highest: the more poetic or ro- 
mantic quality of his genius had already begun 
to fade out when this second part of his finest 
poem was written. Hazlitt has praised the origi- 
nality, dexterity, and vivacity of the effect pro- 
duced by the stratagem which Infelice employs 
for the humiliation of her husband, when by 



8o THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

accusing herself of imaginary infidelity under 
the most incredibly degrading conditions she en- 
traps him into gratuitous fury and turns the 
tables on him by the production of evidence 
against himself; and the scene is no doubt the- 
atrically effective : but the grace and delicacy of 
the character are sacrificed to this comparatively 
unworthy consideration: the pure, high-minded, 
noble-hearted lady, whose loyal and passionate 
affection w^as so simply and so attractively dis- 
played in the first part of her story, is so lament- 
ably humiliated by the cunning and daring im- 
modesty of such a device that we hardly feel it so 
revolting an incongruity as it should have been 
to see this princess enjoying, in common with 
her father and her husband, the spectacle of 
imprisoned harlots on penitential parade in the 
Bridewell of Milan; a thoroughly Hogarthian 
scene in the grim and vivid realism of its tragi- 
comic humor. 

But if the poetic and realistic merits of these 
two plays m9,ke us understand why Webster 
should have coupled its author with the author 
of "Twelfth Night" and "The Merry Wives of 
Windsor," the demerits of the two plays next 
published under his single name are so grave, so 
gross, so manifold, that the writer seems un- 
worthy to be coupled as a dramatist with a 



THOMAS DEKKER 8i 

journeyman poet so far superior to him in honest 
thoroughness and smoothness of workmanship 
as, even at his very hastiest and erudest, was 
Thomas Heywood. In style and versification 
the patriotic and anti-CathoHc drama which 
bears the Protestant and apocalyptic title of 
"The Whore of Babylon" is still, upon the whole, 
very tolerably spirited and fluent, with gleams of 
fugitive poetry and glimpses of animated action ; 
but the construction is ponderous and puerile, the 
declamation vacuous and vehement. An ^schy- 
lus alone could have given us, in a tragedy on the 
subject of the Salamis of England, a fit compan- 
ion to the ' ' Persse " ; which, as Shakespeare let the 
chance pass by him, remains alone forever in the 
incomparable glory of its trumphant and sublime 
perfection. Marlow^e perhaps might have made 
something of it, though the task would have taxed 
his energies to the utmost, and overtasked the 
utmost of his skill ; Dekker could make nothing. 
The Empress of Babylon is but a poor slipshod 
ragged prostitute in the hands of this poetic 
beadle: "non ragioniam di lei, ma guarda e 
passa." 

Of the three plays in which Dekker took part 
with Webster, the two plays in which he took part 
with Ford, and the second play in which he took 
part with Middleton, I have spoken respectively 



82 THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

in my several essays on those other three poets. 
The next play which bears his name alone was 
published five years later than the political or 
historical sketch or study which we have just dis- 
missed; and which, compared with it, is a toler- 
able if not a creditable piece of work. It is dif- 
ficult to abstain from intemperate language in 
speaking of such a dramatic abortion as that 
which bears the grotesque and puerile inscrip- 
tion, "If this be not a good Play, the Devil is in 
it." A worse has seldom discredited the name 
of any man with a spark of genius in him. 
Dry den's delectable tragedy of "Amboyna," 
Lee's remarkable tragicomedy of "Gloriana," 
Pope's elegant comedy of "Three Hours after 
Marriage," are scarcely more unworthy of their 
authors, more futile or more flaccid or more 
audacious in their headlong and unabashed in- 
competence. Charity would suggest that it must 
have been written against time in a debtor's 
prison, under the influence of such liquor as 
Catherina Bountinall or Doll Tearsheet would 
have flung at the tapster's head with an accom- 
paniment of such language as those eloquent and 
high-spirited ladies, under less offensive provoca- 
tion, were wont to lavish on the officials of an 
oppressive law. I have read a good deal of 
bad verse, but anything like the metre of this 



THOMAS DEKKER 83 

play I have never come across in all the range 
of that excruciating experience. The rare and 
faint indications that the writer was or had been 
an humorist and a poet serve only to bring into 
fuller relief the reckless and shameless incom- 
petence of the general workmanship/ 

This supernatural and " superlunatical " at- 
tempt at serious farce or farcical morality marks 

^ As I have given elsewhere a sample of Dekker at his best, 
I give here a sample taken at random from the opening of 
this unhappy play: 

Hie thee to Naples, Rufman; thou shalt find 

A prince there newly crowned, aptly inclined 

To any bendings: lest his youthful brows 

Reach at stars only, weigh down his loftiest boughs 

With leaden plummets, poison his best thoughts with taste 

Of things most sensual: if the heart once waste. 

The body feels consumption: good or bad kings 

Breed subjects like them: clear streams flow from clear 

springs. 
Turn therefore Naples to a puddle: with a civil 
Much promising face, and well oiled, play the court devil. 

The vigorous melody of these "masculine numbers" is not 
more remarkable for its virile force and honied fluency than 
is the lighter dialogue of the play for such brilliant wit or 
lambent humor as flashes out in pleasantries like this : 

King. What are you, and whence come you ? 

Rufman. From Helvetia. 

Spendola. What hell says he ? 

Jovinelli. Peace; you shall know hot hell [sic] time enough. 

"I hope here be proofs" that my strictures on the worst 
work of a poet whose best work I treasure so heartily, and 
whose best qualities I rate so highly, are rather too sparing 
than too severe. 



84 THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

the nadir of Dekker's ability as a dramatist. The 
diabolic part of the tragicomic business is dis- 
tinctly inferior to the parallel or similar scenes 
in the much older play of "Grim the Collier of 
Croydon," which is perhaps more likely to have 
been the writer's immediate model than the orig- 
inal story by Machiavelli. The two remaining 
plays now extant which bear the single name of 
Dekker give no sign of his highest powers, but 
are tolerable examples of journeyman's work in 
the field of romantic or fanciful comedy. ' ' Match 
Me in London" is the better play of the two, very 
fairly constructed after its simple fashion, and 
reasonably well written in a smooth and un- 
ambitious style: "The Wonder of a Kingdom" is 
a light, slight, rough piece of work, in its con- 
trasts of character as crude and boyish as any 
of the old moralities, and in its action as mere 
a dance of puppets: but it shows at least that 
Dekker had regained the faculty of writing decent 
verse on occasion. The fine passage quoted by 
Scott in The Antiquary and taken by his ed- 
itors to be a forgery of his own, will be familiar 
to many myriads of readers who are never likely 
to look it up in the original context. Of two 
masks called "Britannia's Honor" and "Lon- 
don's Tempe" it must suffice to say that the 
former contains a notable specimen of cockney or 



THOMAS DEKKER 85 

canine French which may serve to reheve the 
conscientious reader's weariness, and the latter a 
comic song of blacksmiths at work which may- 
pass muster at a pinch as a tolerably quaint and 
lively piece of rough and ready fancy. But 
Jonson for the court and Middleton for the city 
were far better craftsmen in this line than ever 
was Dekker at his best. 

Two plains remain for notice in which the part 
taken by Dekker would be, I venture to think, 
unmistakable, even if no external evidence were 
extant of his partnership in either. As it is, we 
know that in the winter which saw the close of 
the sixteenth century he was engaged with the 
author of "The Parliament of Bees" and the 
author of "Englishmen for My Money" in the 
production of a play called "The Spanish Moor's 
Tragedy." More than half a century afterward a 
tragedy in which a Spanish Moor is the principal 
and indeed the only considerable agent was pub- 
lished, and attributed — of all poets in the world 
— to Christopher Marlowe, by a knavish and ig- 
norant bookseller of the period. That "Lust's 
Dominion; or, the Lascivious Queen," was partly 
founded on a pamphlet published after Marlowe's 
death was not a consideration sufficient to offer 
any impediment to this imposture. That the 
hand which in the year of this play's appearance 



86 THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

on the stage gave "Old Fortunatus" to the world 
of readers was the hand to which we owe the 
finer scenes or passages of "Lust's Dominion," 
the whole of the opening scene bears such ap- 
parent witness as requires no evidence to support 
and would require very conclusive evidence to 
confute it. The sweet spontaneous luxury of 
the lines in which the queen strives to seduce her 
paramour out of sullenness has the very ring 
of Dekker's melody : the rough and reckless rattle 
of the abrupt rhymes intended to express a sud- 
den vehemence of change and energy; the con- 
stant repetition or reiteration of interjections and 
ejaculations which are evidently supposed to give 
an air of passionate realism and tragic nature 
to the jingling and jerky dialogue; many little 
mannerisms too trivial to specify and too obvious 
to mistake ; the occasional spirit and beauty, the 
frequent crudity and harshness, of the impetuous 
and uncertain style; the faults no less than the 
merits, the merits as plainly as the faults, at- 
test the presence of his fitful and wilful genius 
with all the defects of its qualities and all the 
weakness of its strength. The chaotic extrava- 
gance of collapse which serves by way of catas- 
trophe to bring the action headlong to a close is 
not more puerile in the violence of its debility 
than the conclusions of other plays by Dekker; 



THOMAS DEKKER 87 

conclusions which might plausibly appear, to a 
malcontent or rather to a lenient reader, the im- 
provisations of inebriety. There is but one char- 
acter which stands out in anything of life-like 
relief; for the queen and her paramour are but 
the usual diabolic puppets of the contemporary 
tragic stage: but there is something of life-blood 
in the part of the honest and hot-headed young 
prince. This too is very like Dekker, whose idle 
and impatient energy could seldom if ever sustain 
a diffused or divided interest, but except when 
working hopelessly and heartlessly against time 
was likely to fix on some special point, and give 
life at least to some single figure. 

There is nothing incongruous in his appearance 
as a playwright in partnership with Middleton or 
with Chettle, with Haughton or with Day; but 
a stranger association than that of Massinger's 
name with Dekker's it would not be easy to con- 
ceive. Could either poet have lent the other 
something of his own best quality, could Massin- 
ger have caught from Dekker the freshness and 
spontaneity of his poetic inspiration, and Dekker 
have learned of Massinger the conscientious ex- 
cellence and studious self-respect of his dramatic 
workmanship, the result must have been one of 
the noblest and completest masterpieces of the 
English stage. As it is, the famous and beautiful 



88 THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

play which we owe to the alHance of their powers 
is a proverbial example of incongruous contrasts 
and combinations. The opening and the closing 
scenes were very properly and very fortunately 
consigned to the charge of the younger and 
sedater poet : so that, whatever discrepancy may 
disturb the intervening acts, the grave and sober 
harmonies of a temperate and serious artist begin 
and end the concert in perfect correspondence of 
consummate execution. "The first act of 'The 
Virgin Martyr,' " said Coleridge, "is as fine an act 
as I remember in any play." And certainly it 
would be impossible to find one in which the busi- 
ness of the scene is more skilfully and smoothly 
opened, with more happiness of arrangement, 
more dignity and dexterity of touch. But most 
lovers of poetry would give it all, and a dozen 
such triumphs of scenical and rhetorical com- 
position, for the brief dialogue in the second 
act between the heroine and her attendant angel. 
Its simplicity is so childlike, its inspiration so 
pure in instinct and its expression so perfect 
in taste, its utterance and its abstinence, its ef- 
fusion and its reserve, are so far beyond praise 
or question or any comment but thanksgiving, 
that these forty-two lines, homely and humble in 
manner as they are if compared with the refined 
rhetoric and the scrupulous culture of Massinger, 



THOMAS DEKKER 89 

would suffice to keep the name of Dekker sweet 
and safe forever among the most memorable if 
not among the most pre-eminent of his kindred 
and his age. The four scenes of rough and rank 
buffoonery which deface this act and the two 
following have given very reasonable offence to 
critics from whom they have provoked very un- 
reasonable reflections. That they represent the 
coarser side of the genius whose finer aspect is 
shown in the sweetest passages of the poem has 
never been disputed by any one capable of learn- 
ing the rudiments or the accidence of literary 
criticism. An admirable novelist and poet who 
had the misfortune to mistake himself for a 
theologian and a critic was unlucky enough to 
assert that he knew not on what ground these 
brutal buffooneries had been assigned to their un- 
mistakable author; in other words, to acknowl- 
edge his ignorance of the first elements of the 
subject on which it pleased him to write in a tone 
of critical and spiritual authority. Not even when 
his unwary and unscrupulous audacity of self- 
confidence impelled Charles Kingsley to challenge 
John Henry Newman to the duel of which the up- 
shot left him gasping so piteously on the ground 
selected for their tournament — not even then 
did the author of Hypatia display such a daring 
and immedicable capacity of misrepresentation 



90 THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

based on misconception as when this most in- 
genuously disingenuous of all controversialists 
avowed himself "aware of no canons of internal 
criticism which would enable us to decide as 
boldly as Mr. Gifford does that all the indecency is 
Dekker's and all the poetry Massinger's." Now 
the words of Gifford's note on the dialogue of 
which I have already spoken, between the saint 
and the angel, are these: "What follows is ex- 
quisitely beautiful. ... I am persuaded that this 
also was written by Dekker." And seeing that 
no mortal critic but Kingsley ever dreamed of 
such absurdity as Kingsley rushes forward to 
refute, his controversial capacity will probably 
be regarded by all serious students of poetry or 
criticism as measurable by the level of his ca- 
pacity for accurate report of fact or accurate 
citation of evidence. 

There are times when we are tempted to de- 
nounce the Muse of Dekker as the most shiftless 
and shameless of slovens or of sluts ; but when we 
consider the quantity of work which she managed 
to struggle or shuffle through with such oc- 
casionally admirable and memorable results, we 
are once more inclined to reclaim for her a place 
of honor among her more generally respectable 
or reputable sisters. I am loath to believe what 
I see no reason to suppose, that she was responsi- 



THOMAS DEKKER 91 

ble for the dismal drivel of a poem on the fall 
of Jerusalem, which is assigned, on the surely- 
dangerous ground of initials subscribed under 
the dedication, to a writer who had the misfort- 
une to share these initials with Thomas Deloney. 
The ballad-writing hack may have been capable 
of sinking so far below the level of a penny bal- 
lad as to perpetrate this monstrous outrage on 
human patience and on English verse; but the 
most conclusive evidence would be necessary to 
persuade a jury of competent readers that a poet 
must be found guilty of its authorship. And we 
know that a pamphlet or novelette of Deloney 's 
called "Thomas of Reading; or, the Six Worthy 
Yeomen of the West," was ascribed to Dekker un- 
til the actual author was discovered/ Dr. Gro- 
sart, to whom we owe the first collected edition of 
Dekker's pamphlets, says in the introduction to 
the fifth of his beautiful volumes that he should 
have doubted the responsibility of Dekker for a 



* It would be a very notable addition to Dekker's claims 
on our remembrance if he had indeed written the admirable 
narrative, worthy of Defoe at his very best, which describes 
with such impressive simplicity of tragic effect the presageful 
or premonitory anguish of a man on his unconscious way to 
a sudden and a secret death of unimaginable horror. Had 
Deloney done more such work as this, and abjured the in- 
effectual service of an inauspicious Muse, his name would 
now be famous among the founders and the masters of 
realistic fiction, 



92 THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

poem with which it may perhaps be unfair to 
saddle even so humble a hackney on the poetic 
highway as the jaded Pegasus of Deloney, had 
he not been detected as the author of another 
religious book. But this latter is a book of the 
finest and rarest quality — one of its author's 
most unquestionable claims to immortality in 
the affection and admiration of all but the most 
unworthy readers; and "Canaan's Calamity" 
is one of the worst metrical samples extant of 
religious rubbish. As far as such inferential 
evidence can be allowed to attest anything, the 
fact of Dekker's having written one of the most 
beautiful and simple of religious books in prose 
tends surely rather to disprove than to prove his 
authorship of one of the feeblest and most pre- 
tentious of semi-sacred rhapsodies in verse. 

Among his numerous pamphlets, satirical or 
declamatory, on the manners of his time and the 
observations of his experience, one alone stands 
out as distinct from the rest by right of such 
astonishing superiority in merit of style and in- 
terest of matter that I prefer to reserve it for 
separate and final consideration. But it would 
require more time and labor than I can afford 
to give an adequate account of so many effu- 
sions or improvisations as served for fuel to boil 
the scanty and precarious pot of his uncertain 



THOMAS DEKKER 



93 



and uncomfortable sustenance. "The Wonderful 
Year" of the death of Elizabeth, the accession of 
James, and the devastation of London by pesti- 
lence, supplied him with matter enough for one 
of his quaintest and liveliest tracts : in which the 
historical part has no quality so valuable or re- 
markable as the grotesque mixture of horror and 
humor in the anecdotes appended "like a merry 
epilogue to a dull play, of purpose to shorten the 
lives of long winter's nights that lie watching in 
the dark for us," with touches of rude and vivid 
pleasantry not unworthy to remind us, I dare 
not say of the Decameron, but at least of the 
Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles. In "The Seven Dead- 
ly Sins of London" — one of the milder but less 
brilliant Latter - day Pamphlets of a gentler if 
no less excitable Carlyle — there are touches of 
earnest eloquence as well as many quaint and 
fitful illustrations of social history; but there 
is less of humorous vigor and straightforward 
realism than in the preceding tract. And yet 
there are good things to be gathered out of this 
effusive and vehement lay sermon; this sentence, 
for example, is worth recollection: "He is not 
slothful that is only lazy, that only wastes his 
good hours and his silver in luxury and licentious 
ease : — no, he is the true slothful man, that does 
no good." And there is genuine insight as well 



94 THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

as honesty and courage in his remonstrance with 
the self-love and appeal against the self-deceit 
of his countrymen, so prone to cry out on the 
cruelty of others, on the blood-thirstiness of 
Frenchmen and Spaniards, and to overlook the 
heavy-headed brutality of their own habitual 
indifference and neglect. Although the cruelty 
of penal laws be now abrogated, yet the condition 
of the poorest among us is assuredly not such 
that we can read without a sense of their present 
veracity the last words of this sentence: "Thou 
set'st up posts to whip them when they are alive: 
set up an hospital to comfort them being sick, or 
purchase ground for them to dwell in when they 
be well; and that is, when they be dead." The 
next of Dekker's tracts is more of a mere imita- 
tion than any of his others: the influence of a 
more famous pamphleteer and satirist, Tom 
Nash, is here not only manifest as that of a model, 
but has taken such possession of his disciple 
that he is hardly more than a somewhat servile 
copyist ; not without a touch of his master's more 
serious eloquence, but with less than little of his 
peculiar energy and humor. That rushing wind 
of satire, that storm of resonant invective, that 
inexhaustible volubility of contempt, which rages 
through the controversial writings of the lesser 
poet, has sunk to a comparative whisper; the 



THOMAS DEKKER 95 

roar of his Homeric or Rabelaisian laughter to 
a somewhat forced and artificial chuckle. This 
" News from Hell, brought by the Devil's Carrier," 
and containing "The Devil's Answer to Pierce 
Penniless," might have miscarried by the way 
without much more loss than that of such an 
additional proof as we could have been content 
to spare of Dekker's incompetence to deal with a 
subject which he was curiously fond of handling 
in earnest and in jest. He seems indeed to have 
fancied himself, if not something of a Dante, 
something at least of a Quevedo ; but his terrors 
are merely tedious, and his painted devils would 
not terrify a babe. In this tract, however, there 
are now and then some fugitive felicities of 
expression ; and this is more than can be said for 
either the play or the poem in which he has 
gone, with feebler if not more uneasy steps than 
Milton's Satan, over the same ground of burn- 
ing marl. There is some spirit in the prodigal's 
denunciation of his miserly father: but the best 
thing in the pamphlet is the description of the 
soul of a hero bound for paradise, whose name 
is given only in the revised and enlarged edition 
which appeared a year later under the title of 
"A Knight's Conjuring; done in earnest; dis- 
covered in jest." The narrative of "William 
Eps his death" is a fine example of that fiery 



96 THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

sympathy with soldiers which glows in so many 
pages of Dekker's verse, and flashes out by fits 
through the murky confusion of his worst and 
most formless plays ; but the introduction of this 
hero is as fine a passage of prose as he has left us : 

The foremost of them was a personage of so com- 
posed a presence, that Nature and Fortune had done 
him wrong, if they had not made him a soldier. In his 
countenance there was a kind of indignation, fighting with 
a kind of exalted joy, which by his very gesture were 
apparently decipherable; for he was jocund, that his 
soul went out of him in so glorious a triumph; but 
disdainfully angry, that she wrought her enlargement 
through no more dangers : yet were there bleeding wit- 
nesses enow on his breast, which testified, he did not 
yield till he was conquered, and was not conquered, 
till there was left nothing of a man in him to be over- 
come. 

That the poet's loyalty and devotion were at 
least as ardent when offered by his gratitude to 
sailors as to soldiers we may see by this descrip- 
tion of "The Seaman" in his next work: 

A progress doth he take from realm to realm, 
With goodly water-pageants borne before him; 
The safety of the land sits at his helm, 
No danger here can touch, but what runs o'er him: 
But being in heaven's eye still, it doth restore him 
To livelier spirts; to meet death with ease, 
// thou ivouldst know thy maker, search the seas.'^ 

» The italics arc here the author's. 



THOMAS DEKKER 97 

These homely but hearty Hnes occur in a small 
and mainly metrical tract bearing a title so quaint 
that I am tempted to transcribe it at length: 
"The Double PP. A Papist in Arms. Bearing 
Ten several Shields. Encountered by the Prot- 
estant. At Ten several Weapons. A Jesuit 
Marching before them. Cominus and Eminus." 
There are a few other vigorous and pointed 
verses in this little patriotic impromptu, but 
the greater part of it is merely curious and ec- 
centric doggrel. 
y^ I The next of Dekker's tracts or pamphlets 
[ was the comparatively well-known ' ' Gull's Hom- 
I book." This brilliant and vivid little satire is so 
! rich in simple humor, and in life-like photography 
taken by the sunlight of an honest and kindly 
nature, that it stands second only to the author's 
masterpiece in prose, "The Bachelor's Banquet," 
which has waited so much longer for even the 
limited recognition implied by a private reprint. 
There are so many witty or sensible or humorous 
or grotesque excerpts to be selected from this 
pamphlet — and not from the parts borrowed or 
copied from a foreign satire on the habits of 
^slovenly Hollanders---that I take the first which 
comes under my notice on reopening the book ; 
a study which sets before us in fascinating relief 
the professional poeticule of a period in which as 



98 THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

yet clubs, coteries, and newspapers were not — or 
at the worst were nothing to speak of: 

If you be a Poet, and come into the Ordinary (though 
it can be no great glory to be an ordinary Poet) order 
yourself thus. Observe no man, doff not cap to that 
gentleman to-day at dinner, to whom, not two nights 
since, you were beholden for a supper; but, after a turn 
or two in the room, take occasion (pulling out your 
gloves) to have Epigram, or Satire, or Sonnet fastened 
in one of them, that may (as it were unwittingly to you) 
offer itself to the Gentlemen: they will presently desire 
it: but, without much conjuration from them, and a 
pretty kind of counterfeit lothness in yourself, do not 
read it; and, though it be none of your own, swear you 
made it. 

This coupling of injunction and prohibition is 
worthy of Shakespeare or of Sterne: 

Marry, if you chance to get into your hands any witty 
thing of another man's, that is somewhat better, I would 
counsel you then, if demand be made who composed 
it, you may say: " 'Faith, a learned Gentleman, a very 
worthy friend." And this seeming to lay it on another 
man will be counted either modesty in you, or a sign 
that you are not ambitious of praise, or else that you 
dare not take it upon you, jar fear of the sharpness it 
carries with it. 

The modem poetaster by profession knows a 
trick worth any two of these : but it is curious to 
observe the community of baseness, and the com- 
parative innocence of awkwardness and inexpe- 
rience, which at once connote the species and 



THOMAS DEKKER 99 

denote the specimens of the later and the earHer 
animalcule. 

The "Jests to make you merry," which in Dr. 
Grosart's edition are placed after "The Gull's 
Horn-book," though dated two years earlier, will 
hardly give so much entertainment to any prob- 
able reader in our own time as "The Misery of a 
Prison, and a Prisoner," will give him pain to 
read of in the closing pages of the same pamphlet, 
when he remembers how long — at the lowest 
computation — its author had endured the loath- 
some and hideous misery which he has described 
with such bitter and pathetic intensity and per- 
sistency in detail. Well may Dr. Grosart say 
that "it shocks us to-day, though so far off, to 
think ofi598toi6i6 onwards covering so sorrow- 
ful and humiliating trials for so finely touched a 
spirit as was Dekker's"; but I think as well as 
hope that there is no sort of evidence to that 
surely rather improbable as well as deplorable 
effect. It may be "possible," but it is barely 
possible, that some "seven years' continuous im- 
prisonment" is the explanation of an ambiguous 
phrase which is now incapable of any certain 
solution, and capable of many an interpretation 
far less deplorable than this. But in this pro- 
fessedly comic pamphlet there are passages as 
tragic, if not as powerful, as any in the immortal 



loo THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

pages of Pickwick and Little Dorrit which deal 
with a later but a too similar phase of prison dis- 
cipline and tradition: 

The thing that complained was a man: — "Thy days 
have gone over thee like the dreams of a fool, thy nights 
like the watchings of a madman. — Oh sacred liberty! 
with how little devotion do men come into thy temples, 
when, they cannot bestow upon thee too much honor! 
Thy embracements are more delicate than those of a 
young bride with her lover, and to be divorced from 
thee is half to be damned! For what else is a prison 
but the very next door to hell? It is a man's grave, 
wherein he walks alive : it is a sea wherein he is always 
shipwrackt: it is a lodging built out of the world: it is 
a wilderness where all that v/ander up and down grow 
wild, and all that come into it are devoured." 

In Dekker's next pamphlet, his "Dream," 
there are perhaps half a dozen tolerably smooth 
and vigorous couplets immersed among many 
more vacuous and vehement in the intensity of 
their impotence than any reader and admirer of 
his more happily inspired verse could be expected 
to believe without evidence adduced. Of imag- 
ination, faith, or fancy, the ugly futility of this 
infernal vision has not — unless I have sought 
more than once for it in vain — a single saving 
trace or compensating shadow. 

Two years after he had tried his hand at an 
imitation of Nash, Dekker issued the first of the 
pamphlets in which he attempted to take up the 



THOMAS DEKKER loi 

succession of Robert Greene as a picaresque 
writer, or purveyor of guide-books through the 
realms of rascaldom. "The Bellman of Lon- 
don," or Rogue's Horn-book, begins with a very 
graceful and fanciful description of the quiet 
beauty and seclusion of a country retreat in 
which the author had sought refuge from the 
turmoil and f orgetf ulness of the vices of the city ; 
and whence he was driven back upon London by 
disgust at the discovery of villany as elaborate 
and roguery as abject in the beggars and thieves 
of the country as the most squalid recesses of 
metropolitan vice or crime could supply. The 
narrative of this accidental discovery is very 
lively and spirited in its straightforward sim- 
plicity, and the subsequent revelations of rascal- 
ity are sometimes humorous as well as curious: 
but the demand for such literature must have 
been singularly persistent to evoke a sequel to this 
book next year, ' ' Lantern and Candle-light ; or, the 
Bellman's Second Night-walk," in which Dekker 
continues his account of vagrant and villanous 
society, its lawless laws and its unmannerly man- 
ners; and gives the reader some vivid studies, 
interspersed with facile rhetoric and interlarded 
with indignant declamation, of the tricks of 
horse-dealers and the shifts of gypsies — or " moon- 
men" as he calls them; a race which he regarded 



I02 THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

with a mixture of angry perplexity and passion- 
ate disgust. "A Strange Horse-race" between 
various virtues and vices gives occasion for the 
display of some allegoric ingenuity and much 
indefatigable but fatiguing pertinacity in the ex- 
posure of the more exalted swindlers of the age — 
the crafty bankrupts who anticipated the era of 
the Merdles described by Dickens, but who can 
hardly have done much immediate injury to a 
capitalist of the rank of Dekker. Here too there 
are glimpses of inventive spirit and humorous in- 
genuity; but the insufferable iteration of jocose 
demonology and infernal burlesque might tempt 
the most patient and the most curious of readers 
to devote the author, with imprecations or in- 
vocations as elaborate as his own, to the spirit- 
ual potentate whose "last will and testament" 
is transcribed into the text of this pamphlet. 

In "The Dead Term" such a reader will find 
himself more or less relieved by the return of his 
author to a more terrene and realistic sort of 
allegory. This recriminatory dialogue between 
the London and the Westminster of 1608 is now 
and then rather flatulent in its reciprocity of 
rhetoric, but is enlivened by an occasional breath 
of genuine eloquence, and redeemed by touches of 
historic or social interest. The title and motto of 
the next year's pamphlet — "Work for Armourers; 



THOMAS DEKKER 103 

or, the Peace is Broken. — God help the Poor, the 
rich can shift" — were presumably designed to 
attract the casual reader, by what would now be 
called a sensational device, to consideration of the 
social question between rich and poor — or, as he 
puts it, between the rival queens. Poverty and 
Money. The forces on either side are drawn out 
and arrayed with pathetic ingenuity, and the re- 
sult is indicated with a quaint and grim effect of 
humorous if indignant resignation. * ' The Raven's 
Almanack" of the same year, though portentous 
in its menace of plague, famine, and civil war, is 
less noticeable for its moral and religious decla- 
mation than for its rather amusing than edifying 
anecdotes; which, it must again be admitted, in 
their mixture of jocular sensuality with some- 
what ferocious humor, rather remind us of King 
Louis XI. than of that royal novelist's Italian 
models or precursors. "A Rod for Runaways" 
is the title of a tract which must have somewhat 
perplexed the readers who came to it for practical 
counsel or suggestion, seeing that the very title- 
page calls their attention to the fact that, ' ' if they 
look back, they may behold many fearful judg- 
ments of God, sundry ways pronounced upon this 
city, and on several persons, both flying from it 
and staying in it." What the medical gentleman 
to whom this tract was dedicated may have 



I04 THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

thought of the author's logic and theology, we 
can only conjecture. But even in this little pam- 
phlet there are anecdotes and details which would 
repay the notice of a social historian as curious in 
his research and as studious in his condescension 
as Macaulay. 

A prayer-book written or compiled by a poet 
of Dekker's rank in Dekker's age would have some 
interest for the reader of a later generation even 
if it had not the literary charm which distin- 
guishes the little volume of devotions now reprint- 
ed from a single and an imperfect copy. We can- 
not be too grateful for the good-fortune and the 
generous care to which we are indebted for this 
revelation of a work of genius so curious and so 
delightful that the most fanatical of atheists or 
agnostics, the hardest and the driest of philoso- 
phers, might be moved and fascinated by the 
exquisite simplicity of its beauty. Hardly even 
in those almost incomparable collects which 
Macaulay so aptly compared with the sonnets of 
Milton shall we find sentences or passages more 
perfect in their union of literary grace with ardent 
sincerity than here. Quaint as are several of the 
prayers in the professional particulars of their 
respective appeals, this quaintness has nothing 
of irreverence or incongruity: and the subtle 
simplicity of cadence in the rhythmic movement 



THOMAS DEKKER 105 

of the style is so nearly impeccable that we are 
perplexed to understand how so exquisite an ear 
as was Dekker's at its best can have been tolerant 
of such discord or insensible to such collapse as so 
often disappoints or shocks us in the hastier and 
cruder passages of his faltering and fluctuating 
verse. The prayer for a soldier going to battle 
and his thanksgiving after victory are as noble 
in the dignity of their devotion as the prayers for 
a woman in travail and ' ' for them that visit the 
sick" are delicate and earnest in their tenderness. 
The prayer for a prisoner is too beautiful to stand 
in need of the additional and pathetic interest 
which it derives from the fact of its author's re- 
peated experience of the misery it expresses with 
such piteous yet such manful resignation. The 
style of these faultlessly simple devotions is al- 
most grotesquely set off by the relief of a com- 
parison with the bloated bombast and flatulent 
pedantry of a prayer by the late Queen Elizabeth 
which Dekker has transcribed into his text — it is 
hardly possible to suppose, without perception 
of the contrast between its hideous jargon and the 
refined purity of his own melodious English. The 
prayer for the Council is singularly noble in the 
eloquence of its patriotism: the prayer for the 
country is simply magnificent in the austere music 
of its fervent cadences : the prayer in time of civil 



io6 THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

war is so passionate in its cry for deliverance from 
all danger of the miseries then or lately afflicting 
the continent that it might well have been put 
up by a loyal patriot in the very heat of the great 
war which Dekker might have lived to see break 
out in his own country. The prayer for the even- 
ing is so beautiful as to double our regret for the 
deplorable mutilation which has deprived us of 
all but the opening of the morning prayer.^ The 
feathers fallen from the wings of these "Four 
Birds of Noah's Ark" would be worth more to 
the literary ornithologist than whole flocks of 
such ' ' tame villatic fowl ' ' as people the ordinary 
coops and hen-roosts of devotional literature. 
^ One work only of Dekker's too often over- 
tasked and heavy-laden genius remains to be 
noticed: it is one which gives him a high place 
forever among English humorists. No sooner 
has the reader run his eye over the first three or 
four pages than he feels himself, with delight and 
astonishment, in the company of a writer whose 
genius is akin at once to Goldsmith's and to 
Thackeray's ; a writer whose style is so pure and 
vigorous, so lucid and straightforward, that we 

^ A noticeable instance of the use of a common word in 
the original and obsolete sense of its derivation may be 
cited from the unfortunately truncated and scanty frag- 
ment of a prayer for the court: "Oh Lord, be thou a hus- 
band" (house-band) " to that great household of our King." 



THOMAS DEKKER 107 

seem to have already entered upon the best age 
of EngHsh prose. r^Had Mr. Matthew Arnold, in- 
stead of digging in Chapman for preposterous bar- 
barisms and eccentricities of pedantry, chanced 
to light upon this little treatise, or had he con- 
descended to glance over Daniel's compact and 
admirable "Defence of Rhyme," he would have 
found in writers of the despised Shakespearean 
epoch much more than a foretaste of those excel- 
lent qualities which he imagined to have been 
first imported into our literature by writers of the 
age of Dryden. The dialogue of the very first 
couple introduced with such skilful simplicity of 
presentation at the opening of Dekker's pamphlet 
is worthy of Sterne: the visit of the gossip or 
kinswoman in the second chapter is worthy of 
Moliere, and the humors of the monthly nurse in 
the third are worthy of Dickens. The lamenta- 
tions of the lady for the decay of her health and 
beauty in consequence of her obsequious hus- 
band's alleged neglect, "no more like the woman 
I was than an apple is like an oyster"; the de- 
scription of the poor man making her broth with 
his own hands, jeered at by the maids and 
trampled underfoot by Mrs. Gamp; the prepara- 
tions for the christening supper and the pre- 
liminary feast of scandal — are full of such bright 
and rich humor as to recall even the creator 



io8 THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

of Dogberry and Mrs. Quickly. It is of Shake- 
speare again that we are reminded in the next 
chapter, by the description of the equipage to 
which the husband of "a woman that hath a 
charge of children" is reduced when he has to 
ride to the assizes in sorrier plight than Petruchio 
rode in to his wedding ; the details remind us also 
of Balzac in the minute and grotesque intensity 
of their industrious realism: but the scene on his 
return reminds us rather of Thackeray at the best 
of his bitterest mood — the terrible painter of 
Mrs. Mackenzie and Mrs. General Baynes. "The 
humor of a woman that marries her inferior by 
birth" deals with more serious matters in a style 
not unworthy of Boccaccio; and no comedy of 
the time — Shakespeare's always excepted — ^has a 
scene in it of richer and more original humor than 
brightens the narrative which relates the woes 
of the husband who invites his friends to dinner 
and finds everything under lock and key. Hardly 
in any of Dekker's plays is the comic dialogue so 
masterly as here — so vivid and so vigorous in its 
life-like ease and spontaneity. But there is not 
one of the fifteen chapters, devoted each to the 
description of some fresh "humor," which would 
not deserve, did space and time allow of it, a 
separate note of commentary. The book is 
simply one of the very finest examples of humor- 



THOMAS DEKKER 109 

ous literature, touched now and then with serious 
and even tragic effect, that can be found in any 
language; it is generally and comparatively re- 
markable for its freedom from all real coarse- 
ness or brutality, though the inevitable change 
of manners between Shakespeare's time and our 
own may make some passages or episodes seem 
now and then somewhat over-particular in plain 
speaking or detail. But a healthier, manlier, 
more thoroughly good-natured and good-hu- 
mored book was never written ; nor one in which 
the author's real and respectful regard for wom- 
anhood was more perceptible through the veil 
of a satire more pure from bitterness and more 
honest in design. 

The list of works over which we have now 
glanced is surely not inconsiderable; and yet 
the surviving productions of Dekker's genius or 
necessity are but part of the labors of his life. 
If he wanted — as undoubtedly he would seem to 
have wanted — that "infinite capacity for taking 
pains" which Carlyle professed to regard as the 
synonyme of genius, he was at least not deficient 
in that rough-and-ready diligence which is ha- 
bitually in harness, and cheerfully or resignedly 
prepared for the day's work. The names of 
his lost plays — all generally suggestive of some 
true dramatic interest, now graver and now 



no THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

lighter — are too numerous to transcribe : but one 
at least of them must excite unspeakable amaze- 
ment as well as indiscreet curiosity in every 
reader of Ariosto or La Fontaine who comes in 
the course of the catalogue upon such a title as 
"Jocondo and Astolfo." How on earth the 
famous story of Giocondo could possibly be 
adapted for representation on the public stage of 
Shakespearean London is a mystery which the 
execrable cook of the execrable Warburton has 
left forever insoluble and inconceivable: for to 
that female fiend, the object of Sir Walter Scott's 
antiquarian imprecations, we owe, unless my 
memory misguides me, the loss of this among 
other irredeemable treasures. 

To do justice upon the faults of this poet is 
easy for any sciolist : to do justice to his merits is 
less easy for the most competent scholar and the 
most appreciative critic. In despite of his rare 
occasional spurts or outbreaks of self-assertion or 
of satire, he seems to stand before us a man 
of gentle, modest, shiftless, and careless nature, 
irritable and placable, eager and unsteady, full 
of excitable kindliness and deficient in strenuous 
principle; loving the art which he professionally 
followed, and enjoying the work which he occa- 
sionally neglected. There is no unpoetic note in 
his best poetry such as there is too often — nay, 



THOMAS DEKKER iii 

too constantly — in the severer work and the 
stronger genius of Ben Jonson. What he might 
have done under happier auspices, or with a 
tougher fibre of resolution and perseverance in 
his character, it is waste of time and thought for 
his most sympathetic and compassionate ad- 
mirers to assume or to conjecture: what he has 
done, with all its shortcomings and infirmities, is 
enough to secure for him a distinct and honorable 
place among the humorists and the poets of his 
country. 



JOHN MARSTON 

If justice has never been done, either in his own 
day or in any after age, to a poet of real genius 
and original powers, it will generally be presumed, 
with more or less fairness or unfairness, that this 
is in great part his own fault. Some perversity or 
obliquity will be suspected, even if no positive 
infirmity or deformity can be detected, in his 
intelligence or in his temperament : some taint or 
some flaw will be assumed to affect and to vitiate 
his creative instinct or his spiritual reason. And 
in the case of John Marston, the friend and foe of 
Ben Jonson, the fierce and foul-mouthed satirist, 
the ambitious and overweening tragedian, the 
scornful and passionate humorist, it is easy for 
the shallowest and least appreciative reader to 
perceive the nature and to estimate the weight of 
such drawbacks or impediments as have so long 
and so seriously interfered with the due recogni- 
tion of an independent and remarkable poet. The 
praise and the blame, the admiration and the dis- 
taste excited by his works, are equally just, but 



JOHN MARSTON 113 

are seemingly incompatible: the epithets most 
exactly appropriate to the style of one scene, one 
page, one speech in a scene or one passage in a 
speech, are most ludicrously inapplicable to the 
next. An anthology of such noble and beautiful 
exceipts might be collected from his plays, that 
the reader who should make his first acquaintance 
with this poet through the deceptive means of so 
flattering an introduction would be justified in 
supposing that he had fallen in ^ith a tragic 
dramatist of the very highest order — with a new 
candidate for a station in the very foremost rank 
of English poets. And if the evil star which 
seems generally to have presided over the literary 
fortunes of John Marston should misguide the 
student, on first opening a volume of his works, 
into some such arid or miry tract of wilderness 
as too frequently defonns the face of his uneven 
and irregular demesne, the inevitable sense of 
disappointment and repulsion which must im- 
mediately ensue will too probably discourage a 
casual explorer from any renewal of his research. 
Two of the epithets which Ben Jonson, in his 
elaborate attack on Marston, selected for ridicule 
as characteristically grotesque instances of af- 
fected and infelicitous innovation — but ' which 
nevertheless have taken root in the language, and 
practically justified their adoption — describe as 



114 THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

happily as any that could be chosen to describe 
the better and the worse quality of his early 
tragic and satiric style. These words are "stren- 
uous" and "clumsy." It is perpetually, inde- 
fatigably, and fatiguingly strenuous; it is too 
often vehemently, emphatically, and laboriously 
clumsy. But at its best, when the clumsy and 
ponderous incompetence of expression which dis- 
figures it is supplanted by a strenuous felicity of 
ardent and triumphant aspiration, it has notes 
and touches in the compass of its course not un- 
worthy of Webster or Toumeur or even Shake- 
speare himself. Its occasionally exquisite deli- 
cacy is as remarkable as its more frequent excess 
of coarseness, awkwardness, or violent and elab- 
orate extravagance. No sooner has he said any- 
thing especially beautiful, pathetic, or sublime, 
than the evil genius must needs take his turn, 
exact as it were the forfeit of his bond, impel 
the poet into some sheer perversity, deface the 
flow and form of the verse with some preposter- 
ous crudity or flatulence of phrase which would 
discredit the most incapable or the most fantastic 
novice. And the worst of it all is that he limps 
or stumbles with either foot alternately. At one 
moment he exaggerates the license of artificial 
rhetoric, the strain and swell of the most high- 
flown and hyperbolical poetic diction ; at the next, 



JOHN MARSTON 115 

he falls flat upon the naked level of insignificant 
or offensive realism. 

These are no slight charges; and it is impos- 
sible for any just or sober judgment to acquit 
John Marston of the impeachment conveyed in 
them. The answer to it is practical and simple: 
it is that his merits are great enough to outweigh 
and overshadow them all. Even if his claim to 
remembrance were merely dependent on the 
value of single passages, this would suffice to 
secure him his place of honor in the train of 
Shakespeare. If his most ambitious efforts at 
portraiture of character are often faulty at once 
in color and in outline, some of his slighter 
sketches have a freshness and tenderness of 
beauty which may well atone for the gravest of 
his certainly not infrequent offences. The sweet 
constancy and gentle fortitude of a Beatrice and 
a Mellida remain in the memory more clearly, 
leave a more life-like impression of truth on the 
reader's mind, than the light-headed profligacy 
and passionate instability of such brainless and 
blood-thirsty wantons as Franceschina and Isa- 
bella. In fact, the better characters in Marston's 
plays are better drawn, less conventional, more 
vivid and more human than those of the baser 
sort. Whatever of moral credit may be due to 
a dramatist who paints virtue better than vice, 



i 



ii6 THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

and has a happier hand at a hero's likeness than 
at a villain's, must unquestionably be assigned 
to the author of "Antonio and Mellida." Piero, 
the tyrant and traitor, is little more than a mere 
stage property: like Mendoza in "The Malcon- 
tent" and Syphax in "Sophonisba," he would be 
a portentous ruffian if he had a little more life 
in him; he has to do the deeds and express the 
emotions of a most bloody and crafty miscreant ; 
but it is only now and then that we catch the 
accent of a real man in his tones of cajolery or 
menace, dissimulation or triumph. Andrugio, 
the venerable and heroic victim of his craft and 
cruelty, is a figure not less living and actual than 
stately and impressive : the changes of mood from 
meditation to passion, from resignation to re- 
volt, from tenderness to resolution, which mark 
the development of the character with the proc- 
ess of the action, though painted rather broadly 
than subtly and with more of vigor than of care, 
show just such power of hand and sincerity of 
instinct as we fail to find in the hot and glaring 
colors of his rival's monotonous ruffianism. 
Again, in "The Wonder of Women," the majestic 
figures of Massinissa, Gelosso, and Sophonisba 
stand out in clearer relief than the traitors of the 
senate, the lecherous malignity of Syphax, or the 
monstrous profile of the sorceress Erichtho. In 



JOHN MARSTON 117 

this labored and ambitious tragedy, as in the two 
parts of "Antonio and Mellida," we see the poet 
at his best — and also at his worst. A vehement 
and resolute desire to give weight to every line 
and emphasis to every phrase has too often mis- 
led him into such brakes and jungles of crabbed 
and convulsive bombast, of stiff and tortuous 
exuberance, that the reader in struggling through 
some of the scenes and speeches feels as though 
he were compelled to push his way through a 
cactus hedge: the hot and heavy blossoms of 
rhetoric blaze and glare out of a thickset fence of 
jagged barbarisms and exotic monstrosities of 
metaphor. The straining and sputtering dec- 
lamation of narrative and oratory scarcely suc- 
ceeds in expressing through a dozen quaint and 
far-fetched words or phrases what two or three 
of the simplest would easily and amply have 
sufficed to convey. But when the poet is content 
to deliver his message like a man of this world, 
we discover with mingled satisfaction, astonish- 
ment, and irritation that he can write when he 
pleases in a style of the purest and noblest 
simplicity ; that he can make his characters con- 
verse in a language worthy of Sophocles when he 
does not prefer to make them stutter in a dialect 
worthy of Lycophron. And in the tragedy of 
"Sophonisba" the display of this happy capac- 



ii8 THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

ity is happily reserved for the crowning scene 
of the poem. It would be difficult to find any- 
where a more preposterous or disjointed piece of 
jargon than the speech of Asdrubal at the close 
of the second act: 

Brook open scorn, faint powers! — 
Make good the camp! — No, fly! — yes, what? — wild 

rage ! — 
To be a prosperous villain! yet some heat, some hold; 
But to burn temples, and yet freeze, O cold! 
Give me some health ; now your blood sinks : thus deeds 
111 nourished rot: without Jove nought succeeds. 

And yet this passage occurs in a poem which 
contains such a passage as the following: 

And now with undismayed resolve behold, 

To save you — you — for honor and just faith • 

Are most true gods, which we should much adore — 

With even disdainful vigor I give up 

An abhorred life! — You have been good to me, 

And I do thank thee, heaven. O my stars, 

I bless your goodness, that with breast unstained. 

Faith pure, a virgin wife, tried to my glory, 

I die, of female faith the long-lived story; 

Secure from bondage and all servile harms. 

But more, most happy in my husband's arms. 

The lofty sweetness, the proud pathos, the 
sonorous simplicity of these most noble verses 
might scarcely suffice to attest the poet's posses- 
sion of any strong dramatic faculty. But the 



JOHN MARSTON 119 

scene immediately preceding bears evidence of a 
capacity for terse and rigorous brevity of dialogue 
in a style as curt and condensed as that of Tacitus 
or Dante: 

Sophonisba. What unjust grief afflicts my worthy 
lord? 

Massinissa. Thank me, ye gods, with much behold- 
ingness ; 
For, mark, I do not curse you. 

Sophonisba. Tell me, sweet, 

The cause of thy much anguish. 

Massinissa. Ha, the cause? 

Let's see; wreathe back thine arms, bend down thy 

neck, 
Practise base prayers, make fit thyself for bondage. 

Sophonisba. Bondage! 

Massinissa. Bondage: Roman bondage. 

Sophonisba. No, no!^ 

Massinissa. How then have I vowed well to Scipio ? 

Sophonisba. How then to Sophonisba? 

Massinissa. Right: which way 

Run mad? impossible distraction!- 

* This verse, unmusical to an English ear, is good Italian 
metre; possibly an intentional and deliberate example of the 
poet's Italian predilections, and if so certainly a less irra- 
tional and inexplicable one than the intrusion of some 
villanously bad Italian lines and phrases into the text of 
"Antonio and Mellida." 

2 In other words — intolerable or unimaginable division or 
divulsion of mind and spirit between two contending calls of 
honor, two irreconcilable claims of duty. Modern editors 
of this great scene have broken up the line into pieces, 
marked or divided by superfluous dashes and points of 
exclamation. Campbell, who had the good taste to confute 
his own depreciatory criticism of Marston by including the 



I20 THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

Sophonisba. Dear lord, thy patience ; let it maze all 
power, 
And list to her in whose sole heart it rests 
To keep thy faith upright. 

Massinissa. Wilt thou be slaved? 

Sophonisba. No; free. 

Massinissa. How then keep I my faith ? 

Sophonisba. My death 

Gives help to all. From Rome so rest we free: 
So brought to Scipio, faith is kept in thee. 

Massinissa. Thou darest not die! — Some wine. — 
Thou darest not die! 

Sophonisba. How near was I unto the curse of man, 

Joy! 

How like was I yet once to have been glad! 
He that ne'er laughed may with a constant face 
Contemn Jove's frown. Happiness makes us base. 

The man or the boy does not seem to me 
enviable who can read or remember these verses 
without a thrill. In sheer force of concision they 
recall the manner of Alfieri ; but that noble tragic 
writer could hardly have put such fervor of 
austere passion into the rigid utterance, or touch- 
ed the note of emotion with such a glowing depth 
of rapture. That "bitter and severe delight" — if 
I may borrow the superb phrase of Landor — 
which inspires and sustains the imperial pride of 
self-immolation might have found in his dramatic 

passage among his "Selections," was the first, as far as I 
know, to adopt this erroneous and rather spasmodic 
punctuation. 



JOHN MARSTON 121 

dialect an expression as terse and as sincere: it 
could hardly have clothed itself with such majes- 
tic and radiant solemnity of living and breathing 
verse. The rapid elliptic method of amoebcean 
dialogue is more in his manner than in any 
English poet's known to me except the writer of 
this scene; but indeed Marston is in more points 
than one the most Italian of our dramatists. His 
highest tone of serious poetry has in it, like 
Alfieri's, a note of self-conscious stoicism and 
somewhat arrogant self-control ; while as a comic 
writer he is but too apt, like too many transalpine 
wits, to mistake filth for fun, and to measure the 
neatness of a joke by its nastiness. Dirt for 
dirt's sake has never been the apparent aim of 
any great English humorist who had not about 
him some unmistakable touch of disease — some 
inheritance of evil or of suffering like the con- 
genital brain-sickness of Swift or the morbid 
infirmity of Sterne. A poet of so high an order 
as the author of "Sophonisba" could hardly fail 
to be in general a healthier writer than such as 
these; but it cannot be denied that he seems 
to have been somewhat inclined to accept the 
illogical inference which would argue that be- 
cause some wit is dirty all dirt must be witty — 
because humor may sometimes be indecent, in- 
decency must always be humorous. "The clar- 
9 



122 THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

tier the cosier" was an old proverb among the 
northern peasantry while yet recalcitrant against 
the inroads of sanitary reform: "the dirtier the 
droller" would seem to have been practically the 
no less irrational motto of many not otherwise 
unadmirable comic writers. It does happen that 
the drollest character in all Marston's plays is 
also the most offensive in his language — ' ' the 
foulest-mouthed profane railing brother"; but 
the drollest passages in the whole part are those 
that least want washing. How far the example of 
Ben Jonson may have influenced or encouraged 
Marston in the indulgence of this unlovely pro- 
pensity can only be conjectured; it is certain that 
no third writer of the time, however given to 
levity of speech or audacity in the selection 
of a subject, was so prone — in Shakespeare's 
phrase — to "talk greasily" as the authors of 
"Bartholomew Fair" and "The Dutch Cour- 
tesan." 

In the two parts of his earlier tragedy the 
interest is perhaps, on the whole, rather better 
sustained than in "The Wonder of Women." The 
prologue to "Antonio's Revenge" (the second 
part of the "Historic of Antonio and Mellida") 
has enjoyed the double correlative honor of 
ardent appreciation by Lamb and responsive 
depreciation by Gifford. Its eccentricities and 



JOHN MARSTON 123 

perversities of phrase' may be no less noticeable, 
but shoiild assuredly be accounted less memo- 
rable, than its profound and impassioned fervor 
of grave and eloquent harmony. Strange, way- 
ward and savage as is the all but impossible story, 
rude and crude and crabbed as is the pedantically 
exuberant language of these plays, there are 
touches in them of such terrible beauty and such 
terrible pathos as to convince any competent 
reader that they deserve the tribute of such 
praise and such dispraise. The youngest student 
of Lamb's "Specimens" can hardly fail to rec- 
ognize this when he compares the vivid and 
piercing description of the death of Mellida with 
the fearful and supernatural impression of the 
scene which brings or thrusts before us the im- 
molation of the child, her brother. 

The labored eccentricity of style which sig- 
nalizes and disfigures the three chief tragedies or 
tragic poems of Marston is tempered and subdued 
to a soberer tone of taste and a more rational 
choice of expression in his less ambitious and less 
unequal works. It is almost impossible to imagine 
any insertion or addition from the hand of Web- 
ster which would not be at once obvious to any 
reader in the text of "Sophonisba" or in either 

^ One strange phrase in the very first line is surely a 
palpable misprint — ramps for cramps. 



124 THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

part of "Antonio and Mellida." Their fierce 
and irregular magnificence, their feverish and 
strenuous intemperance of rhetoric, would have 
been too glaringly in contrast with the sublime 
purity of the greater poet's thought and style 
In the tragicomedy of "The Malcontent," pub- 
lished two years later than the earlier and two 
years earlier than the later of these poems, if the 
tone of feeling is but little changed or softened, 
the language is duly clarified and simplified. 
"The Malcontent, (augmented) by Marston, with 
the additions written by John Webster," is as 
coherent, as harmonious, as much of a piece 
throughout, as was the text of the play in its 
earlier state. Not all the conscientious art and 
skill of Webster could have given this uniformity 
to a work in which the original design and ex- 
ecution had been less in keeping with the bent 
of his own genius and the accent of his natural 
style. Sad and stem, not unhopeful or unloving, 
the spirit of this poem is more in harmony with 
that of Webster's later tragedies than with that of 
Marston's previous plays; its accent is sardonic 
rather than pessimistic, ironical rather than de- 
spondent. The plot is neither well conceived 
nor well constructed ; the catastrophe is little less 
than absurd, especially from the ethical or moral 
point of view ; the characters are thinly sketched, 



JOHN MARSTON 125 

the situations at once forced and conventional; 
there are few sorrier or stranger figures in serious 
fiction than that of the penitent usurper when 
he takes to his arms his repentant wife, together 
with one of her two paramours, in a sudden 
rapture of forgiving affection; the part which 
gives the play its name is the only one drawn 
with any firmness of outline, unless we except 
that of the malignant and distempered old para- 
site; but there is a certain interest in the awk- 
ward evolution of the story, and there are scenes 
and passages of singular power and beauty which 
would suffice to redeem the whole work from 
condemnation or oblivion, even though it had 
not the saving salt in it of an earnest and evi- 
dent sincerity. The brooding anger, the resentful 
resignation, the impatient spirit of endurance, 
the bitter passion of disdain, which animate the 
utterance and direct the action of the hero, are 
something more than dramatically appropriate; 
it is as obvious that these are the mainsprings 
of the poet's own ambitious and dissatisfied in- 
telligence, sullen in its reluctant submission and 
ardent in its implacable appeal, as that his ear- 
lier undramatic satires were the tumultuous and 
turbid ebullitions of a mood as morbid, as rest- 
less, and as honest. Coarse, rough, and fierce as 
those satires are, inferior alike to Hall's in finish 



126 THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

of verse and to Donne's in weight of matter, it 
seems to me that Dr. Grosart, their first careful 
and critical editor, is right in claiming for them 
equal if not superior credit on the score of ear- 
nestness. The crude ferocity of their invective 
has about it a savor of honesty which atones for 
many defects of literary taste and executive art ; 
and after a more thorough study than such rude 
and unattractive work seems at first to require or 
to deserve, the moral and intellectual impression 
of the whole will not improbably be far more 
favorable than one resulting from a cursory 
survey or derived from a casual selection of 
excerpts. They bring no manner of support to 
a monstrous and preposterous imputation which 
has been cast upon their author; the charge of 
having been concerned in a miserably malignant 
and stupid attempt at satire under the form of a 
formless and worthless drama called "Histrio- 
mastix";^ though his partnership in another 
anonymous play — a semi-romantic semi-satirical 
comedy called "Jack Drum's Entertainment" — 
is very much more plausibly supportable by com- 

^ This abortion of letters is such a very moon-calf, begotten 
by malice on idiocy, that no human creature above the in- 
tellectual level of its author will ever dream of attempting 
to decipher the insignificant significance which may possibly 
— though improbably — lie latent under the opaque veil of 
its inarticulate virulence. 



JOHN MARSTON 127 

parison of special phrases as well as of general 
style with sundry mannerisms as well as with the 
habitual turn of speech in Marston's acknowl- 
edged comedies. There is a certain incomposite 
and indigestive vigor in the language of this play 
which makes the attribution of a principal share 
in its authorship neither utterly discreditable to 
Marston nor absolutely improbable in itself ; and 
the satire aimed at Ben Jonson, if not especially 
relevant to the main action, is at all events less 
incongruous and preposterous in its relation to 
the rest of the work than the satirical or con- 
troversial part of Dekker's "Satiromastix." But 
on the whole, if this play be Marston's, it seems 
to me the rudest and the poorest he has left us, 
except perhaps the comedy of "What you Will," 
in which several excellent and suggestive situa- 
tions are made less of than they should have been, 
and a good deal of promising comic invention is 
wasted for want of a little more care and a little 
more conscience in cultivation of material and 
composition of parts. The satirical references to 
Jonson are more pointed and effective in this 
comedy than in either of the two plays last men- 
tioned ; but its best claim to remembrance is to be 
sought in the admirable soliloquy which relates 
the seven yearS' experience of the student and his 
spaniel. Marston is too often heaviest when he 



128 THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

would and should be lightest — owing apparently 
to a certain infusion of contempt for light comedy 
as something rather beneath him, not wholly wor- 
thy of his austere and ambitious capacity. The 
parliament of pages in this play is a diverting 
interlude of farce, though a mere irrelevance and 
impediment to the action ; but the boys are less 
amusing than their compeers in the anonymous 
comedy of "Sir Giles Goosecap," first published 
in the year preceding : a work of genuine humor 
and invention, excellent in style if somewhat in- 
firm in construction, for a reprint of which we 
are indebted to the previous care of Marston's 
present editor. Far be it from me to intrude on 
the barren and boggy province of hypothetical 
interpretation and controversial commentary; 
but I may observe in passing that the original of 
Simplicius Faber in ' ' What you Will " must surely 
have been the same hanger-on or sycophant of 
Ben Jonson's who was caricatured by Dekker in 
his "Satiromastix" under the name of Asinius 
Bubo. The gross assurance of self-complacent 
duncery, the apish arrogance and imitative dog- 
matism of reflected self-importance and authority 
at second hand, are presented in either case 
with such identity of tone and coloring that 
we can hardly imagine the satire to have been 
equally applicable to two contemporary sat- 



JOHN MARSTON 129 

ellltes of the same imperious and masterful 
egoist. 

That the same noble poet and high-souled 
humorist was not responsible for the offence 
given to Caledonian majesty in the comedy of 
"Eastward Ho!" the authentic word of Jonson 
would be sufficient evidence ; but I am inclined to 
think it a matter of almost certain likelihood — if 
not of almost absolute proof — that Chapman was 
as innocent as Jonson of a jest for which Marston 
must be held responsible — though scarcely, I 
should imagine, blamable at the present day by 
the most rabid of Scottish provincialists. In the 
last scene of "The Malcontent" a court lady says 
to an infamous old hanger-on of the court: "And 
is not Signor St. Andrew a gallant fellow now?" 
to which the old hag replies: "Honor and he 
agree as well together as a satin suit and woollen 
stockings." The famous passage in the comedy 
which appeared a year later must have been far 
less offensive to the most nervous patriotism than 
this; and the impunity of so gross an insult, so 
obviously and obtrusively offered, to the new 
knightships and lordships of King James's venal 
chivalry and parasitic nobility, may naturally 
have encouraged the satirist to repeat his stroke 
next year — and must have astounded his retro- 
spection, when he found himself in prison, and 



I30 THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

tinder threat of worse than imprisonment, to- 
gether with his unoffending associates in an ad- 
mirable and inoffensive comedy. It is impossible 
to suppose that he would not have come forward 
to assume the responsibility of his own words — 
as it is impossible to imagine that Jonson or 
Chapman would have given up his accomplice to 
save himself. But the law of the day would 
probably have held them all responsible alike. 

In the same year as "Eastward Ho!" appeared 
the best and completest piece of work which we 
owe to the single hand of Marston. A more 
brilliant and amusing play than "The Dutch 
Courtesan," better composed, better constructed, 
and better written, it would be difficult to dis- 
cover among the best comic and romantic works 
of its incomparable period. The slippery and san- 
guinary strumpet who gives its name to the play 
is sketched with such admirable force and free- 
dom of hand as to suggest the existence of an 
actual model who may unconsciously have sat 
for the part under the scrutiny of eyes as keen 
and merciless as ever took notes for a savagely 
veracious caricature — or for an unscrupulously 
moral exposure. The jargon in which her emo- 
tions are expressed is as Shakespearean in its 
breadth and persistency as that of Dr. Caius or 
Captain Fluellen; but the reality of those emo- 



JOHN MARSTON 131 

tions is worthy of a less farcical vehicle for the 
expression of such natural craft and passion. The 
sisters, Beatrice and Crispinella, seem at first too 
evidently imitated from the characters of Aurelia 
and Phoenixella in the earliest surviving comedy 
of Ben Jonson; but the "comedy daughter," as 
Dickens (or Skimpole) would have expressed it, 
is even more coarsely and roughly drawn than in 
the early sketch of the more famous dramatist. 
On the other hand, it must be allowed — though it 
may not be recognized without a certain sense 
of surprise — that the nobler and purer type of 
womanhood or girlhood which we owe to the 
hand of Marston is far above comparison with any 
which has been accomplished or achieved by the 
studious and vehement elaboration of Ben Jon- 
son's. The servility of subservience which that 
great dramatist exacts from his typically vir- 
tuous women — from the abject and anaemic wife 
of a Corvino or a Fitzdottrel — is a quality which 
could not coexist with the noble and loving 
humility of Marston's Beatrice. The admirable 
scene in which she is brought face to face with 
the impudent pretentions of the woman who 
asserts herself to have been preferred by the 
betrothed lover of the expectant bride is as 
pathetic and impressive as it is lifelike and orig- 
inal; and even in the excess of gentleness and 



132 THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

modesty which prompts the words, ' ' I will love 
you the better; I cannot hate what he affected," 
there is nothing less noble or less womanly than 
in the subsequent reply to the harlot's repeated 
taunts and inventions of insult : ' ' He did not ill 
not to love me, but sure he did not well to mock 
me: gentle minds will pity, though they cannot 
love; yet peace and my love sleep with him." 
The powerful soliloquy which closes the scene ex- 
presses no more than the natural emotion of the 
man who has received so lovely a revelation of 
his future bride's invincible and single-hearted 
love: 

Cannot that woman's evil, jealousy, 

Despite disgrace, nay, which is worse, contempt, 

Once stir thy faith? 

Coarse as is often the language of Marston's plays 
and satires, the man was not coarse-minded — not 
gross of spirit nor base of nature — who could 
paint so delicately and simply a figure so beau- 
tiful in the tenderness of its purity. 

The farcical underplot of this play is worthy 
of Moliere in his broader mood of farce. Hardly 
any Jourdain or Pourceaugnac, any George Dan- 
din or Comtesse d'Escarbagnas of them all, under- 
goes a more grotesque experience or plays a more 
ludicrous part than is devised for Mr. and Mrs. 



JOHN MARSTON 133 

Mtilligriib by the ingenuity of the indefatigable 
Cocledemoy — a figure worthy to stand beside any 
of the tribe of Mascarille as fourbum imperator. 
The animation and variety of inventive humor 
which keep the reader's laughing attention awake 
and amused throughout these adventurous scenes 
of incident and intrigue are not more admirable 
than the simplicity and clearness of evolution or 
composition which recall and rival the classic 
masterpieces of Latin and French comedy. There 
is perhaps equal fertility of humor, but there 
certainly is not equal harmony of structure in the 
play which Marston published next year — ' ' Para- 
sitaster; or, the Fawn"; a name probably sug- 
gested by that of Ben Jonson's "Poetaster," in 
which the author had himself been the subject of 
a greater man's rage and ridicule. The wealth and 
the waste of power displayed and paraded in this 
comedy are equally admirable and lamentable; 
for the brilliant effect of its various episodes and 
interludes is not more obvious than the eclipse of 
the central interest, the collapse of the serious 
design, which results from the agglomeration of 
secondary figures and the alternations of per- 
petual by-play. Three or four better plays might 
have been made out of the materials here hurled 
and huddled together into one. The Isabelle of 
Moliere is not more amusing or more delightful in 



134 THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

her audacity of resource, in her combination of 
loyalty with duplicity, innocence with intrigue, 
than the daring and single-hearted young heroine 
of this play; but the "Ecole des Maris" is not 
encumbered with such a crowd of minor interests 
and characters, of subordinate humors and com- 
plications, as the reader of Marston's comedy 
finds interposed and intruded between his atten- 
tion and the main point of interest. He would 
fain see more of Dulcimel and Tiberio, the in- 
genious and enterprising princess, the ingenuous 
and responsive prince; he is willing to see as 
much as is shown him of their fathers, the mas- 
querading philosopher and the self-complacent 
dupe; Granuffo, the patrician prototype of Cap- 
tain John Bunsby, may take a seat in the cham- 
bers of his memory beside the commander of 
the Cautious Clara; the humors of a jealous 
foul-minded fool and a somewhat audaciously 
virtuous wife may divert him by the inventive 
and vigorous exposure of their various revolu- 
tions and results; but the final impression is one 
of admiring disappointment and possibly un- 
grateful regret that so much energetic satire and 
so much valuable time should have been spent 
on the somewhat nauseous follies of "sickly 
knights" and "vicious braggarts" that the really 
admirable and attractive parts of the design are 



JOHN MARSTON 135 

cramped and crowded out of room for the due 
development of their just and requisite propor- 
tions. 

A more eccentric, uneven, and incomposite 
piece of work than "The Insatiate Countess" it 
would be difficult to find in English or in other 
literature. The opening scene is picturesque and 
impressive; the closing scene of the serious part 
is noble and pathetic ; but the intervening action 
is of a kind which too often aims at the tragic and 
hits the burlesque. The incessant inconstancy 
of passion which hurries the fantastic heroine 
through such a miscellaneous multitude of im- 
provised intrigues is rather a comic than a tragic 
motive for the conduct of a play ; and the farcical 
rapidity with which the puppets revolve makes it 
impossible for the most susceptible credulity to 
take any real interest or feel any real belief in the 
perpetual rotation of their feverish moods and 
motives, their irrational doings and sufferings. 
The humor of the underplot constantly verges on 
horse-play, and is certainly neither delicate nor 
profound ; but there is matter enough for mirth 
in it to make the reader duly grateful for the 
patient care and admirable insight which Mr. 
Bullen has brought to bear upon the really formi- 
dable if apparently trivial task of reducing the 
chaotic corruption and confusion of the text 



136 THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

to reasonable form and comprehensible order. 
William Barkstead, a narrative poet of real merit, 
and an early minister at the shrine of Shake- 
speare, has been credited with the authorship 
of this play: I am inclined to agree with the 
suggestion of its latest editor — its first editor 
in any serious sense of the word — that both he 
and Marston may have had a hand in it. His 
"Myrrha" belongs to the same rather morbid 
class of poems as Shakespeare's "Venus and 
Adonis" and Marston's "Pygmalion's Image." 
Of the three Shakespeare's is not more certainly 
the finest in occasional touches of picturesque 
poetry than it is incomparably the most offensive 
to good taste and natural instinct on the score 
of style and treatment. Marlowe's "Hero and 
Leander ' ' can only be classed with these elaborate 
studies of sensual aberration or excess by those 
"who can see no difference between Titian and 
French photographs." (I take leave, for once in 
a way, to quote from a private letter — long since 
addressed to the present commentator by the 
most illustrious of writers on art.) 

There are some pretty verses and some in- 
genious touches in Marston's "Entertainment," 
offered to Lady Derby by her daughter and son- 
in-law^; but the Latinity of his city pageant can 
scarcely have satisfied the pupil of Buchanan, 



JOHN MARSTON 137 

unless indeed the reputation of King James's 
tutor as a Latin versifier or master of prosody has 
been scandalously usurped under the falsest of 
pretences: a matter on which I am content to 
accept the verdict of Landor. His contribution 
to Sir Robert Chester's problematic volume may 
perhaps claim the singular distinction of being 
more incomprehensible, more crabbed, more pre- 
posterous, and more inexplicable than any other 
copy of verses among the ' ' divers poetical essays 
— done by the best and chiefest of our modem 
writers, with their names subscribed to their 
particular works," in which Marston has the 
honor to stand next to Shakespeare; and how- 
ever far he may be from any pretention to rival 
the incomparable charm of Shakespeare's open- 
ing quatrain — incomparable in its peculiar mel- 
ody and mystery except with other lyrics of 
Shakespeare's or of Shelley's, it must, I think, 
be admitted that an impartial student of both 
effusions will assign to Marston rather than to 
Shakespeare the palm of distinction on the score 
of tortuous obscurity and enigmatic verbiage. It 
may be — as it seems to me — equally difficult to 
make sense of the greater and the lesser poet's 
riddles and rhapsodies ; but on the whole I cannot 
think that Shakespeare's will be found so des- 
perately indigestible by the ordinary intelligence 



138 THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

of manhood as Marston's. "The turtles fell to 
work, and ate each other up," in a far more com- 
prehensible and reasonable poem of Hood's ; and 
most readers of Chester's poem and the verses 
appended to it will be inclined to think that it 
might have been as well — except for a few lines of 
Shakespeare's and of Jonson's which we could 
not willingly spare — if the Phoenix and Turtle 
had set them the example. 

If the apparently apocryphal Mountebank's 
Masque be really the work of Marston — and it is 
both coarse enough and clever enough to deserve 
the attribution of his authorship — there is a sin- 
gular echo in it from the opening of Jonson's 
"Poetaster," the furious dramatic satire which 
blasted for upward of two centuries the fame or 
the credit of the poet to whose hand this masque 
has been hitherto assigned. In it, after a full 
allowance of rough and ribald jocosity, the pres- 
ence of a poet becomes manifest with the en- 
trance of an allegoric figure whose declamatory 
address begins with these words: 

Light, I salute thee; I, Obscurity, 
The son of Darkness and forgetful Lethe; 
I, that envy thy brightness, greet thee now, 
Enforced by Fate. 

Few readers of these lines will forget the verses 



JOHN MARSTON 139 

with which Envy plays prologue to "Poetaster; 
or, his Arraignment": 

Light, I salute thee, but with wounded nerves, 
Wishing thy golden splendor pitchy darkness. 

Whoever may be the author of this masque, there 
are two or three couplets well worth remembrance 
in one of the two versions of its text: 

It is a life is never ill 

To lie and sleep in roses still. 

Who would not hear the nightingale still sing, 
Or who grew ever weary of the spring? 
The day must have her night, the spring her fall. 
All is divided, none is lord of all. 

These verses are worthy of a place in any one of 
Mr. Bullen's beautiful and delightful volumes of 
lyrics from Elizabethan song-books; and higher 
praise than this no lyrical poet could reasonably 
desire. 

An inoffensive monomaniac, who thought fit 
to reprint a thing in dramatic or quasi-dramatic 
form to which I have already referred in pass- 
ing — "Histriomastix; or, the Player Whipt " — 
thought likewise fit to attribute to John Marston, 
of all men on earth, a share in the concoction of 
this shapeless and unspeakable piece of nonsense. 
The fact that one of the puppets in the puppet- 



I40 THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

show is supposed to represent a sullen scholar, 
disappointed, impoverished, and virulent, would 
have suggested to a rational reader that the 
scribbler who gave vent to the impotence of his 
rancor in this hopeless ebullition of envious de- 
spair had set himself to ape the habitual man- 
ner of Jonson and the occasional manner of 
Marston with about as much success as might be 
expected from a malignant monkey when at- 
tempting to reproduce in his grimaces the ex- 
pression of human indignation and contempt. 
But to students of natural or literary history 
who cannot discern the human from the simious 
element it suggests that the man thus imitated 
must needs have been the imitator of himself; 
and the fact that the whole attempt at satire is 
directed against dramatic poetry — that all the 
drivelling venom of a dunce's denunciation, all 
the virulent slaver of his grovelling insolence, 
is aimed at the stage for which Marston was em- 
ployed in writing — weighs nothing in the scales 
of imbecility against the consideration that Mar- 
ston's or Jonson's manner is here and there more 
or less closely imitated; that we catch now and 
then some such echo of his accent, some such 
savor of his style, as may be discovered or im- 
agined in the very few scattered lines which 
show any glimmer of capacity for composition 



JOHN MARSTON 141 

or versification. The eternal theme of envy, in- 
vented by Jonson and worked to death by its in- 
ventor, was taken up again by Marston and treat- 
ed with a vigorous acerbity not always unworthy 
of comparison with Jonson 's: the same concep- 
tion inspired with something of eloquence the 
malignant idiocy of the satirical dunce who has 
left us, interred and embedded in a mass of rub- 
bish, a line or two like these which he has put 
into the mouth of his patron saint or guardian 
goddess, the incarnate essence of Envy: 

Turn, turn, thou lackey to the winged time! 
I envy thee in that thou art so slow, 
And I so swift to mischief. 

But the entire affair is obviously an effusion and 
an example of the same academic sagacity or 
lucidity of appreciation which found utterance in 
other contemporary protests of the universities 
against the universe. In that abyss of dulness 
"The Return from Parnassus," a reader or a 
diver who persists in his thankless toil will dis- 
cover this pearl of a fact — that men of culture 
had no more hesitation in preferring Watson to 
Shakespeare than they have in preferring Byron 
to Shelley. The author of the one deserves to 
have been the author of the other. Nobody can 
have been by nature such a fool as to write 



142 THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

either: art, education, industry, and study were 
needful to achieve such composite perfection of 
elaborate and consummate idiocy. 

There is a good deal of bad rubbish, and there 
is some really brilliant and vigorous writing, in 
the absurdly named and absurdly constructed 
comedy of "Jack Drum's Entertainment"; but 
in all other points — in plot, incident, and pres- 
entation of character — it is so scandalously be- 
neath contempt that I am sorry to recognize 
the hand of Marston in a play which introduces 
us to a "noble father," the model of knightly 
manhood and refined good sense, who on the 
news of a beloved daughter's disappearance in- 
stantly proposes to console himself with a heavy 
drinking-bout. No graver censure can be passed 
on the conduct of the drama than the admission 
that this monstrous absurdity is not out of keep- 
ing with the rest of it. There is hardly a single 
character in all its rabble rout of lunatics who 
behaves otherwise than would beseem a pro- 
bationary candidate for Bedlam. Yet I fear 
there is more serious evidence of a circumstantial 
kind in favor of the theory which would saddle 
the fame of Marston with the charge of its author- 
ship than such as depends on peculiarities of 
metre and eccentricities of phrase. Some other 
poet — though I know of none such — may have 



JOHN MARSTON 143 

accepted and adopted his theory that "ven- 
geance" must count in verse as a word of three 
syllables: I can hardly believe that the fancy 
would sound sweet in any second man's ear: but 
this speciality is not more characteristic than 
other and more important qualities of style — the 
peculiar abruptness, the peculiar inflation, the 
peculiar crudity — which denote this comedy as 
apparently if not evidently Marstonian. On the 
other hand, if it were indeed his, it is impossible 
to conjecture why his name should have been 
withheld from the title-page ; and it must not be 
forgotten that even our own day is not more 
fertile than was Marston's in the generation of 
that slavish cattle which has always since the 
age of Horace fed ravenously and thievishly on 
the pasture-land of every poet who has discovered 
or reclaimed a field or a province of his own. 

But our estimate of John Marston's rank or 
regiment in the noble army of contemporary 
poets will not be in any way affected by accept- 
ance or rejection of any apocryphal addition to 
the canon of his writings. For better and for 
worse, the orthodox and undisputed roll of them 
will suffice to decide that question beyond all 
chance of intelligent or rational dispute. His 
rank is high in his own regiment ; and the colonel 
of that regiment is Ben Jonson. At first sight 



144 THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

he may seem rather to belong to that brighter and 
more famous one which has Webster among its 
captains, Dekker among its lieutenants, Hey- 
wood among its privates, and Shakespeare at its 
head. Nor did he by any means follow the 
banner of Jonson with such automatic fidelity as 
that imperious martinet of genius was wont 
to exact from those who came to be "sealed of 
the tribe of Ben." A rigid critic — a critic who 
should push rigidity to the verge of injustice — 
might say that he was one of those recruits in 
literature whose misfortune it is to fall between 
two stools — to halt between two courses. It is 
certain that he never thoroughly mastered either 
the cavalry drill of Shakespeare or the infantry 
drill of Jonson. But it is no less certain that the 
few finest passages which attest the power and the 
purity of his genius as a poet are above com- 
parison with any such examples of tragic poetry 
as can be attributed with certainty or with plau- 
sibility to the hand which has left us no ac- 
knowledged works in that line except "Sejanus 
his Fall" and "Catiline his Conspiracy." It 
is superfluous to add that "Volpone" was an 
achievement only less far out of his reach than 
" Hamlet." But this is not to say or to imply that 
he does not deserve an honorable place among 
English poets. His savage and unblushing vio- 



JOHN MARSTON 145 

lence or vehemence of satire has no taint of gloat- 
ing or morbid prurience in the turbid flow of its 
fitful and furious rhetoric. The restless rage of 
his invective is as far as human utterance can 
find itself from the cynical infidelity of an lago. 
Of him we may say with more rational confidence 
what was said of that more potent and more 
truculent satirist: 

An honest man he is, and hates the slime 
That sticks on filthy deeds. 

We may wish that he had not been so much given 
to trampling and stamping on that slime as to 
evoke such malodorous exhalations as infect the 
lower and shallower reaches of the river down 
which he proceeds to steer us with so strenuous a 
hand. But it is in a spirit of healthy disgust, not 
of hankering delight, that he insists on calling the 
indignant attention of his readers to the baser 
and fouler elements of natural or social man as 
displayed in the vicious exuberance or eccentric- 
ity of affectation or of self-indulgence. His real 
interest and his real sympathies are reserved for 
the purer and nobler types of womanhood and 
manhood. In his first extant tragedy, crude and 
fierce and coarse and awkward as is the general 
treatment of character and story, the sketch of 
Mellida is genuinely beautiful in its pathetic and 



146 THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

subdued simplicity; though certainly no such 
tender and gentle figure was ever enchased in a 
stranger or less attractive setting. There is an 
odd mixture of care and carelessness in the com- 
position of his plays which is exemplified by the 
fact that another personage in the first part of 
the same dramatic poem was announced to re- 
appear in the second part as a more important 
and elaborate figure; but this second part opens 
with the appearance of his assassin, red-handed 
from the murder: and the two parts were pub- 
lished in the same year. And indeed, except 
in " Parasitaster " and "The Dutch Courtesan," 
a general defect in his unassisted plays is the 
headlong confusion of plot, the helter-skelter 
violence of incident, which would hardly have 
been looked for in the work of a professional and 
practised hand. "What you Will" is modestly 
described as "a slight-writ play": but slight and 
slovenly are not the same thing ; nor is simplicity 
the equivalent of incoherence. I have already 
observed that Marston is apt to be heaviest when 
he aims at being lightest; not, like Ben Jonson, 
through a laborious and punctilious excess of 
conscience which is unwilling to let slip any 
chance of effect, to let pass any detail of presen- 
tation; but rather, we are tempted to suspect, 
through a sardonic sense of scorn for the per- 



JOHN MARSTON 147 

functory task on which his ambitious and im- 
patient hand is for the time employed. Now 
and then, however — or perhaps it would be more 
accurate to say once or twice — a gayer note is 
struck with a lighter touch than usual: as, for 
instance, in the excellent parody of Lyly put into 
the mouth of an idiot in the first scene of the 
fifth act of the first part of "Antonio and Mel- 
lida." "You know, the stone called lapis, the 
nearer it comes to the fire, the hotter it is; and 
the bird which the geometricians call avis, the 
farther it is from the earth, the nearer it is to the 
heaven ; and love, the nigher it is to the flame, the 
more remote (there's a word, remote!)— the more 
remote it is from the frost." Shakespeare and 
Scott have condescended to caricature the style 
or the manner of the inventor of euphuism : I can- 
not think their burlesque of his elaborate and 
sententious triviality so happy, so humorous, or 
so exact as this. But it is not on his capacity as 
a satirist or humorist, it is on his occasionally 
triumphant success as a serious or tragic poet, 
that the fame of Marston rests assuredly es- 
tablished. His intermittent power to rid himself 
for a while of his besetting faults, and to acquire 
or assume for a moment the very excellences 
most incompatible with these, is as extraordinary 
for the completeness as for the transience of its 



148 THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

successful effects. The brief fourth act of "An- 
tonio and MeUida" is the most astonishing and 
bewildering production of belated human genius 
that ever distracted or discomfited a student. 
Verses more delicately beautiful followed by- 
verses more simply majestic than these have 
rarely if ever given assurance of eternity to the 
fame of any but a great master in song : 

Conceit you me: as having clasped a rose 

Within my palm, the rose being ta'en away, 

My hand retains a little breath of sweet, 

So may man's trunk, his spirit slipped away, 

Hold still a faint perfume of his sweet guest. 

'Tis so: for when discursive powers fly out, 

And roam in progress through the bounds of heaven, 

The soul itself gallops along with them 

As chieftain of this winged troop of thought, 

Whilst the dull lodge of spirit standeth waste 

Until the soul return. 

Then follows a passage of sheer gibberish ; then a 
dialogue of the noblest and most dramatic elo- 
quence; then a chaotic alternation of sense and 
nonsense, bad Italian and mixed English, abject 
farce and dignified rhetoric, spirited simplicity 
and bombastic jargon. It would be more and 
less than just to take this act as a sample or a 
symbol of the author's usual way of work ; but I 
cannot imagine that a parallel to it, for evil and 
for good, could be found in the works of any other 
writer. 



JOHN MARSTON 149 

The Muse of thivS poet is no maiden of such 
pure and august beauty as enthralls us with ad- 
miration of Webster's; she has not the gypsy 
brightness and vagrant charm of Dekker's, her 
wild soft glances and flashing smiles and fading 
traces of tears; she is no giddy girl, but a strong 
woman with fine irregular features, large and 
luminous eyes, broad intelligent forehead, eye- 
brows so thick and close together that detraction 
might call her beetle-browed, powerful mouth 
and chin, fine contralto voice (with an occasional 
stammer), expression alternately repellent and 
attractive, but always striking and sincere. No 
one has ever found her lovely ; but there are times 
when she has a fascination of her own which 
fairer and more famous singers might envy her; 
and the friends she makes are as sure to be con- 
stant as she, for all her occasional roughness and 
coarseness, is sure to be loyal in the main to the 
nobler instincts of her kind and the loftier tradi- 
tions of her sisterhood. 



THOMAS MIDDLETON 

If it be true, as we are told on high authority, 
that the greatest glory of England is her litera- 
ture and the greatest glory of English literature 
is its poetry, it is not less true that the greatest 
glory of English poetry lies rather in its dramatic 
than its epic or its lyric triumphs. The name of 
Shakespeare is above the names even of Milton 
and Coleridge and Shelley : and the names of his 
comrades in art and their immediate successors 
are above all but the highest names in any other 
province of our song. There is such an over- 
flowing life, such a superb exuberance of abound- 
ing and exulting strength, in the dramatic poetry 
of the half -century extending from 1590 to 1640, 
that all other epochs of English literature seem 
as it were but half awake and half alive by com- 
parison with this generation of giants and of gods. 
There is more sap in this than in any other branch 
of the national bay-tree: it has an energy in 
fertility which reminds us rather of the forest 
than the garden or the park. It is trtte that the 



THOMAS MIDDLETON 151 

weeds and briers of the underwood are but too 
likely to embarrass and offend the feet of the 
rangers and the gardeners who trim the level 
flower-plots or preserve the domestic game of 
enclosed and ordered lowlands in the tamer 
demesnes of literature. The sun is strong and 
the wind sharp in the climate which reared the 
fellows and the followers of Shakespeare. The 
extreme inequality and roughness of the ground 
must also be taken into account when we are dis- 
posed, as I for one have often been disposed, to 
wonder beyond measure at the apathetic igno- 
rance of average students in regard of the abun- 
dant treasure to be gathered from this wildest 
and most fruitful province in the poetic empire 
of England. And yet, since Charles Lamb threw 
open its gates to all comers in the ninth year 
of the nineteenth century, it cannot but seem 
strange that comparatively so few should have 
availed themselves of the entry to so rich and 
royal an estate. The subsequent labors of Mr. 
Dyce made the rough ways plain and the devious 
paths straight for all serious and worthy students. 
And now again Mr. Bullen has taken up a task 
than which none more arduous and important, 
none worthier of thanks and praise, can be un- 
dertaken by an English scholar. In his beautiful 
and valuable edition of Marlowe there are but 



152 THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

two points to which exception may be taken. 
It was, I think, a fault of omission to exclude the 
apocryphal play of "Lust's Dominion" from a 
place in the appendix: it was, I am certain, a 
fault of commission to admit instead of it the 
much bepuffed and very puffy rubbish of the late 
Mr. Home. That clever, versatile, and energetic 
writer never went so far out of his depth or 
floundered so pitifully in such perilous waters 
as when he ventured to put verses of his own into 
the mouth of Christopher Marlowe. These errors 
we must all hope to see rectified in a second issue 
of the text: and meantime we can but welcome 
with all possible gratitude and applause the mag- 
nificent series of old plays by unknown writers 
which we owe to the keen research and the fine 
appreciation of Marlowe's latest editor. Of these 
I may find some future occasion to speak: my 
present business is with the admirable poet who 
has been promoted to the second place in Mr. 
Bullen's collection of the English dramatists. 

The selection of Middleton for so distinguished 
a place of honor may probably not approve itself 
to the judgment of all experts in dramatic litera- 
ture. Charles Lamb, as they will all remember, 
would have advised the editor ' ' to begin with the 
collected plays of Heywood": which as yet, like 
the plays of Dekker and of Chapman, remain un- 



THOMAS MIDDLETON 153 

edited in any serious or scholarly sense of the 
term. The existing reprints merely reproduce, 
without adequate elucidation or correction, the 
corrupt and chaotic text of the worst early edi- 
tions : while Middleton has for upward of half a 
century enjoyed the privilege denied to men who 
are usually accounted his equals if not his supe- 
riors in poetic if not in dramatic genius. Even 
for an editor of the ripest learning and the highest 
ability there is comparatively little to do where 
Mr. Dyce has been before him in the field. How- 
ever, we must all give glad and grateful welcome 
to a new edition of a noble poet who has never 
yet received his full meed of praise and justice: 
though our gratitude and our gladness may be 
quickened and dilated by the proverbial sense 
of further favors to come. 

The first word of modem tribute to the tragic 
genius of Thomas Middleton was not spoken by 
Charles Lamb. Four years before the appearance 
of the priceless volume which established his fame 
forever among all true lovers of English poetry 
by copious excerpts from five of his most charac- 
teristic works, Walter Scott, in a note on the fifty- 
sixth stanza of the second fytte of the metrical 
romance of "Sir Tristrem," had given a passing 
word of recognition to the "horribly striking" 
power of "some passages " in Middleton's master- 



154 THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

piece : which was first reprinted eleven years later, 
in the fourth volume of Dilke's Old Plays. Lamb, 
surprisingly enough, has given not a single ex- 
tract from that noble tragedy : it was reserved for 
Leigh Hunt, when speaking of its author, to 
remark that "there is one character of his (De 
Flores in 'The Changeling') which, for effect at 
once tragical, probable, and poetical, surpasses 
anything I know of in the drama of domestic life." 
The praise is not a whit too high ; the truth could 
not have been better said. 

The play with which Mr. Bullen, altering the 
arrangement adopted by Mr. Dyce, opens his 
edition of Middleton, is a notable example of the 
best and the worst qualities which distinguish or 
disfigure the romantic comedy of the Shake- 
spearean age. The rude and reckless composition, 
the rough intrusion of savorless farce, the be- 
wildering combinations of incident and the far 
more bewildering fluctuations of character — all 
the inconsistencies, incongruities, incoherences of 
the piece are forgotten when the reader remem- 
bers and reverts to the passages of exquisite and 
fascinating beauty which relieve and redeem the 
utmost errors of negligence and haste. To find 
anything more delightful, more satisfying in its 
pure and simple perfection of loveliness, we must 
turn to the very best examples of Shakespeare's 



THOMAS MIDDLETON 155 

youthful work. Nay, it must be allowed that in 
one or two of the master's earliest plays — in "Two 
Gentlemen of Verona," for instance — we shall find 
nothing comparable for charm and sincerity of 
sweet and passionate fancy with such enchant- 
ing verses as these: 

O happy persecution, I embrace thee 

With an unfettered soul! So sweet a thing 

It is to sigh upon the rack of love, 

Where each calamity is groaning witness 

Of the poor martyr's faith. I never heard 

Of any true affection, but 'twas nipt 

With care, that, like the caterpillar, eats 

The leaves off the spring's sweetest book, the rose. 

Love, bred on earth, is often nursed in hell: 

By rote it reads woe, ere it learn to spell. 

Again: the "secure tyrant, but unhappy lover," 
whose prisoner and rival has thus expressed his 
triumphant resignation, is counselled by his 
friend to "go laugh and lie down," as not having 
slept for three nights; but answers, in words 
even more delicious than his supplanter's : 

Alas, how can I ? he that truly loves 

Bums out the day in idle fantasies; 

And when the lamb bleating doth bid good-night 

Unto the closing day, then tears begin 

To keep quick time unto the owl, whose voice 

Shrieks like the bellman in the lover's ears: 

Love's eye the jewel of sleep, O, seldom wears! 

The early lark is wakened from her bed. 

Being only by love's plaints disquieted; 



iS6 THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

And, singing in the morning's ear, she weeps, 
Being deep in love, at lovers' broken sleeps: 
But say a golden slumber chance to tie 
With silken strings the cover of love's eye, 
Then dreams, magician-like, mocking present 
Pleasures, whose fading leaves more discontent. 



Perfect in music, faultless in feeling, exquisite in 
refined simplicity of expression, this passage is 
hardly more beautiful and noble than one or two 
in the play which follows. "The Phoenix" is a 
quaint and homely compound of satirical realism 
in social studies with Utopian invention in the 
figure of an ideal prince, himself a compound of 
Harun-al-Rashid and "Albert the Good," who 
wanders through the play as a detective in dis- 
guise, and appears in his own person at the close 
to discharge in full the general and particular 
claims of justice and philanthropy. The whole 
work is slight and sketchy, primitive if not puerile 
in parts, but easy and amusing to read ; the con- 
fidence reposed by the worthy monarch in noble- 
men of such unequivocal nomenclature as Lord 
Proditor, Lussurioso, and Infesto, is one of the 
signs that we are here still on the debatable 
borderland between the old Morality and the new 
Comedy — a province where incarnate vices and 
virtues are seen figuring and posturing in what 
can scarcely be called masquerade. But the two 



THOMAS MIDDLETON 157 

fine soliloquies of Phoenix on the corruption of the 
purity of law (act i. scene iv.) and the profana- 
tion of the sanctity of marriage (act ii. scene ii.) 
are somewhat riper and graver in style, with less 
admixture of rhyme and more variety of cadence, 
than the lovely verses above quoted. Milton's 
obligation to the latter passage is less direct than 
his earlier obligation to a later play of Middleton's 
from which he transferred one of the most beau- 
tiful as well as most famous images in ' ' Lycidas ' ' : 
but his early and intimate acquaintance with 
Middleton had apparently (as Mr, Dyce seems to 
think') left in the ear of the blind old poet a more 
or less distinct echo from the noble opening verses 
of the dramatist's address to "reverend and 
honorable matrimony." 

* Mr. Dyce would no doubt have altered his opinion had 
he lived to see the evidence adduced by the Director of the 
New Meltun Society that the real author of "A Game at Chess' ' 
was none other than John Milton himself, whose earliest 
poems had appeared the year before the publication of that 
anti-papal satire. This discovery is only less curious and 
precious than a later revelation which we must accept on 
the same authority, that " Comus " was written by Sir John 
Suckling, "Paradise Regained" by Lord Rochester, and 
" Samson Agonistes " by Elkanah Settle: while on the other 
hand it may be affirmed with no less confidence that Milton 
— who never would allow his name to be spelled right on the 
title-page or under the dedication of any work published 
by him — owed his immunity from punishment after the 
Restoration to the admitted fact that he was the real author 
of Dryden's "Astraea Redux." 



158 THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

In "Michaelmas Term" the reaHsm of Middle- 
ton's comic style is no longer alloyed or flavored 
with poetry or fancy. It is an excellent Ho- 
garthian comedy, full of rapid and vivid incident, 
of pleasant or indignant humor. Its successor, 
' ' A Trick to Catch the Old One, " is by far the best 
play Middleton had yet written, and one of the 
best he ever wrote. The merit of this and his 
other good comedies does not indeed consist in 
any new or subtle study of character, any Shake- 
spearean creation or Jonsonian invention of hu- 
mors or of men : the spendthrifts and the misers, 
the courtesans and the dotards, are figures bor- 
rowed from the common stock of stage tradition : 
it is the vivid variety of incident and intrigue, 
the freshness and ease and vigor of the style, the 
clear straightforward energy and vivacity of the 
action, that the reader finds most praiseworthy 
in the best comic work of such ready writers as 
Middleton and Dekker. The dialogue has some- 
times touches of real humor and flashes of 
genuine wit: but its readable and enjoyable 
quality is generally independent of these. Very 
witty writing may be very dreary reading, for 
want of natural animation and true dramatic 
movement: and in these qualities at least the 
rough-and-ready work of our old dramatists is 
seldom if ever deficient. 



THOMAS MIDDLETON 159 

It is, however, but too probable that the 
reader's enjoyment may be crossed with a dash of 
exasperation when he finds a writer of real genius 
so reckless of fame and self-respect as the pressure 
of want or the weariness of overwork seems but 
too often and too naturally to have made too 
many of the great dramatic journeymen whose 
powers were half wasted or half worn out in the 
struggle for bare bread. No other excuse than 
this can be advanced for the demerit of Middle- 
ton's next comedy. Had the author wished to 
show how well and how ill he could write at his 
worst and at his best, he could have given no 
fairer proof than by the publication of two plays 
issued under his name in the same year 1608. 
"The Family of Love" is, in my judgment, un- 
questionably and incomparably the worst of 
Middleton's plays: very coarse, very dull, alto- 
gether distasteful and ineffectual. As a religious 
satire it is so utterly pointless as to leave no 
impression of any definite folly or distinctive 
knavery in the doctrine or the practice of the 
particular sect held up by name to ridicule: an 
obscure body of feather-headed fanatics, con- 
cerning whom we can only be certain that they 
were decent and inoffensive in comparison with 
the yelling Yahoos whom the scandalous and 
senseless license of our own day allows to run 



i6o THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

and roar about the country unmuzzled and un- 
whipped. 

There is much more merit in the broad comedy 
of "Your Five Gallants," a curious burlesque 
study of manners and morals not generally 
commendable for imitation. The ingenious and 
humorous invention which supplies a centre for 
the picture and a pivot for the action is most sin- 
gularly identical with the device of a modem 
detective as recorded by the greatest English 
writer of his day, "The Butcher's Story," told 
to Dickens by the policeman who had played the 
part of the innocent young butcher, may be 
profitably compared by lovers of detective 
humor with the story of Fitsgrave — a "thrice 
worthy" gentleman who under the disguise of a 
young gull fresh from college succeeds in cir- 
cumventing and unmasking the five associated 
swindlers of variously villanous professions by 
whom a fair and amiable heiress is beleaguered 
and befooled. The play is somewhat crude and 
hasty in construction, but full of life and fun and 
grotesque variety of humorous event. 

The first of Middleton's plays to attract notice 
from students of a later generation, "A Mad 
World, My Masters," if not quite so thoroughly 
good a comedy as "A Trick to Catch the Old 
One," must be allowed to contain the very best 



THOMAS MIDDLETON i6i 

comic character ever drawn or sketched by the 
fertile and flowing pen of its author. The prodigal 
grandfather, Sir Bounteous Progress, is perhaps 
the most life-like figure of a good-humored and 
liberal old libertine that ever amused or scan- 
dalized a tolerant or intolerant reader. The chief 
incidents of the action are admirably humorous 
and ingenious; but the matrimonial part of the 
catastrophe is something more than repulsive, and 
the singular intervention of a real live succubus, 
less terrible in her seductions than her sister of 
the "Contes Drolatiques," can hardly seem happy 
or seasonable to a generation which knows not 
King James and his Demonology. 

Of the two poets occasionally associated with 
Middleton in the composition of a play, Dekker 
seems usually to have taken in hand the greater 
part, and Rowley the lesser part, of the composite 
poem engendered by their joint efforts. The 
style of "The Roaring Girl" is full of Dekker's 
peculiar mannerisms; slipshod and straggling 
metre, incongruous touches or flashes of fanciful 
or lyrical expression, reckless and awkward in- 
versions, irrational and irrepressible outbreaks 
of irregular and fitful rhyme. And with all 
these faults it is more unmistakably the style 
of a bom poet than is the usual style of Mid- 
dleton. Dekker would have taken a high place 



i62 THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

among the finest if not among the greatest of 
English poets if he had but had the sense of 
form — the instinct of composition. Whether it 
was modesty, indolence, indifference, or incom- 
petence, some drawback or shortcoming there 
was which so far impaired the quality of his 
strong and delicate genius that it is impossible 
for his most ardent and cordial admirer to say 
or think of his very best work that it really does 
him justice — that it adequately represents the 
fulness of his unquestionable powers. And yet 
it is certain that Lamb was not less right than 
usual when he said that Dekker "had poetry 
enough for anything." But he had not construc- 
tive power enough for the trade of a playwright — 
the trade in which he spent so many weary years 
of ill-requited labor. This comedy in which we 
first find him associated with Middleton is well 
written and well contrived, and fairly diverting 
— especially to an idle or an uncritical reader: 
though even such an one may suspect that the 
heroine here represented as a virginal virago must 
have been in fact rather like Dr. Johnson's fair 
friend Bet Flint; of whom the Great Lexicog- 
rapher ' ' used to say that she was generally slut 
and drunkard; occasionally whore and thief" 
(Boswell, May 8, 1781). The parallel would 
have been more nearly complete if Moll Cutpurse 



THOMAS MIDDLETON 163 

"had written her own Life in verse," and brought 
it to Selden or Bishop Hall with a request that he 
would furnish her with a preface to it. 

The plays of Middleton are not so properly 
divisible into tragic and comic as into realistic 
and romantic — into plays of which the mainspring 
is essentially prosaic or photographic, and plays 
of which the mainspring is principally fanciful or 
poetical. Two only of the former class remain 
to be mentioned: "Anything for a Quiet Life" 
and "A Chaste Maid in Cheapside." There is 
very good stuff in the plot or groundwork of the 
former, but the workmanship is hardly worthy of 
the material. Mr. BuUen ingeniously and plau- 
sibly suggests the partnership of Shirley in this 
play: but the conception of the character in 
which he discerns a likeness to the touch of the 
lesser dramatist is happier and more original than 
such a comparison would indicate. The young 
stepmother whose affectation of selfish levity and 
grasping craft is really designed to cure her hus- 
band of his infatuation, and to reconcile him 
with the son who regards her as his worst enemy, 
is a figure equally novel, effective, and attractive. 
The honest shopkeeper and his shrewish wife may 
remind us again of Dickens by their points of 
likeness to Mr. and Mrs. Snagsby; though the 
reformation of the mercer's jealous vixen is 



1 64 THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

brought about by more humorous and less tragical 
means than the repentance of the law-stationer's 
"little woman," George the apprentice, through 
whose wit and energy this happy consummation 
becomes possible, is a very original and amusing 
example of the young Londoner of the period. 
But there is more humor, though very little 
chastity, in the "Chaste Maid"; a play of quite 
exceptional freedom and audacity, and certainly 
one of the drollest and liveliest that ever broke 
the bounds of propriety or shook the sides of 
merriment. 

The opening of "More Dissemblers Besides 
Women" is as full at once of comic and of ro- 
mantic promise as the upshot of the whole is 
unsatisfactory — a most lame and impotent con- 
clusion. But some of the dialogue is exquisite; 
full of flowing music and gentle grace, of ease 
and softness and fancy and spirit; and the part 
of a poetic or romantic Joseph Surface, as perfect 
in the praise of virtue as in the practice of vice, is 
one of Middleton's really fine and happy inven- 
tions. In the style of "The Widow" there is no 
less fluency and facility: it is throughout iden- 
tical with that of Middleton's other comedies in 
metre ; a style which has so many points in com- 
mon with Fletcher's as to make the apocryphal 
attribution of a share in this comedy to the hand 



THOMAS MIDDLETON 165 

of the greater poet more plausible than many 
other ascriptions of the kind. I am inclined 
nevertheless to agree with Mr. Bullen's apparent 
opinion that the whole credit of this brilliant play 
may be reasonably assigned to Middleton; and 
especially with his remark that the only scene in 
which any resemblance to the manner of Ben 
Jonson can be traced by the most determined 
ingenuity of critical research is more like the 
work of a pupil than like a hasty sketch of the 
master's. There is no lack of energetic invention 
and beautiful versification in another comedy of 
adventure and intrigue, * ' No Wit, No Help Like a 
Woman's": the unpleasant or extravagant qual- 
ity of certain incidents in the story is partially 
neutralized or modified by the unfailing charm 
of a style worthy of Fletcher himself in his ripest 
and sweetest stage of poetic comedy. 

But high above all the works yet mentioned 
there stands and will stand conspicuous while 
noble emotion and noble verse have honor among 
English readers the pathetic and heroic play so 
memorably appreciated by Charles Lamb, "A 
Fair Quarrel." It would be the vainest and 
emptiest impertinence to offer a word in echo of 
his priceless and imperishable praise. The deli- 
cate nobility of the central conception on which 
the hero's character depends for its full relief and 



1 66 THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

development should be enough to efface all re- 
membrance of any defect or default in moral 
taste, any shortcoming on the aesthetic side of 
ethics, which may be detected in any slighter or 
hastier example of the poet's invention. A man 
must be dull and slow of sympathies indeed who 
cannot respond in spirit to that bitter cry of 
chivalrous and manful agony at sense of the 
shadow of a mother's shame: 

Quench, my spirit, 
And out with honor's flaming lights within thee! 
Be dark and dead to all respects of manhood! 
I never shall have use of valor more. 

Middleton has no second hero like Captain Ager: 
but where is there another so thoroughly noble 
and lovable among all the characters of all the 
dramatists of his time but Shakespeare? 

The part taken by Rowley in this play is easy 
for any tiro in criticism to verify. The rough and 
crude genius of that perverse and powerful writer 
is not seen here by any means at its best. I 
should say that his call was rather toward tragedy 
than toward comedy ; that his mastery of severe 
and serious emotion was more genuine and more 
natural than his command of satirical or gro- 
tesque realism. The tragedy in which he has 
grappled with the subject afterward so differ- 
ently handled in the first and greatest of Lan- 



THOMAS MIDDLETON 167 

dor's tragedies is to me of far more interest and 
value than such comedies as that which kin- 
dled the enthusiasm of a loyal Londoner in the 
civic sympathies of Lamb. Disfigured as it is 
toward the close by indulgence in mere horror 
and brutality after the fashion of Andronicus or 
Jeronimo, it has more beauty and power and 
pathos in its best scenes than a reader of his 
comedies would have expected. But in the 
underplot of "A Fair Quarrel" Rowley's beset- 
ting faults of coarseness and quaintness, stiffness 
and roughness, are so flagrant and obtrusive that 
we cannot avoid a feeling of regret and irritation 
at such untimely and inharmonious evidence of 
his partnership with a poet of finer if not of 
sturdier genius. The same sense of discord and 
inequality will be aroused on comparison of the 
worse with the better parts of "The Old Law." 
The clumsiness and dulness of the farcical inter- 
ludes can hardly be paralleled in the rudest and 
hastiest scenes of Middleton's writing: while the 
sweet and noble dignity of the finer passages have 
the stamp of his ripest and tenderest genius on 
every line and in every cadence. But for sheer 
bewildering incongruity there is no play known 
to me which can be compared with "The Mayor 
of Queenborough." Here again we find a note so 
dissonant and discordant in the lighter parts of 



i68 THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

the dramatic concert that we seem at once to 
recognize the harsher and hoarser instrument of 
Rowley. The farce is even more extravagantly 
and preposterously mistimed and misplaced than 
that which disfigures the play just mentioned: 
but I thoroughly agree with Mr. Bullen's high 
estimate of the power displayed and maintained 
throughout the tragic and poetic part of this 
drama; to which no previous critic has ever 
vouchsafed a word of due acknowledgment. The 
story is ugly and unnatural, but its repulsive 
effect is transfigured or neutralized by the charm 
of tender or passionate poetry; and it must be 
admitted that the hideous villany of Vortiger and 
Horsus affords an opening for subsequent scenic 
effects of striking and genuine tragical interest. 
The difference between the genius of Middle- 
ton and the genius of Dekker could not be better 
illustrated than by comparison of their attempts 
at political and patriotic allegory. The lazy, 
slovenly, impatient genius of Dekker flashes out 
by fits and starts on the reader of the play in 
which he has expressed his English hatred of 
Spain and Popery, his English pride in the rout 
of the Armada, and his English gratitude for the 
part played by Queen Elizabeth in the crowning 
struggle of the time: but his most cordial ad- 
mirer can hardly consider "The Whore of Baby- 



THOMAS MIDDLETON 169 

Ion" a shining or satisfactory example of dra- 
matic art. The play which brought Middleton 
into prison, and earned for the actors a sum so 
far beyond parallel as to have seemed incredible 
till the fullest evidence was procured, is one of 
the most complete and exquisite works of artis- 
tic ingenuity and dexterity that ever excited or 
offended, enraptured or scandalized an audience 
of friends or enemies: the only work of English 
poetry which may properly be called Aristo- 
phanic. It has the same depth of civic serious- 
ness, the same earnest ardor and devotion to the 
old cause of the old country, the same solid 
fervor of enthusiasm and indignation, which 
animated the third great poet of Athens against 
the corruption of art by the sophistry of Eu- 
ripides and the corruption of manhood by the 
sophistry of Socrates. The delicate skill of the 
workmanship can only be appreciated by careful 
and thorough study; but that the infusion of 
poetic fancy and feeling into the generally comic 
and satiric style is hardly unworthy of the com- 
parison which I have ventured to challenge, I 
will take but one brief extract for evidence : 

Upon those lips, the sweet fresh buds of youth, 
The holy dew of prayer lies, like pearl 
Dropt from the opening eyelids of the morn 
Upon a bashful rose. 



I70 THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

Here for once even "that celestial thief" John 
Milton has impaired rather than improved the 
effect of the beautiful phrase borrowed from an 
earlier and inferior poet. His use of Middleton's 
exquisite image is not quite so apt — so perfectly 
picturesque and harmonious — as the use to which 
it was put by the inventor. 

Nothing in the age of Shakespeare is so diffi- 
cult for an Englishman of our own age to realize 
as the temper, the intelligence, the serious and 
refined elevation of an audience which was at once 
capable of enjoying and applauding the roughest 
and coarsest kinds of pleasantry, the rudest and 
crudest scenes of violence, and competent to 
appreciate the finest and the highest reaches of 
poetry, the subtlest and the most sustained allu- 
sions of ethical or political symbolism. The 
large and long popularity of an exquisite dramatic 
or academic allegory such as "Lingua," which 
would seem to appeal only to readers of excep- 
tional education, exceptional delicacy of percep- 
tion, and exceptional quickness of wit, is hardly 
more remarkable than the popular success of a 
play requiring such keen constancy of atten- 
tion, such vivid wakefulness and promptitude 
of apprehension, as this even more serious than 
fantastic work of Middleton's. The vulgarity 
and puerility of all modem attempts at any 



THOMAS MIDDLETON 171 

comparable effect need not be cited to throw into 
relief the essential finish, the impassioned in- 
telligence, the high spiritual and literary level, 
of these crowded and brilliant and vehement 
five acts. Their extreme cleverness, their in- 
defatigable ingenuity, would in any case have 
been remarkable : but their fulness of active and 
poetic life gives them an interest far deeper and 
higher and more permanent than the mere sense 
of curiosity and wonder. 

But if "A Game at Chess" is especially distin- 
guished by its complete and thorough harmony of 
execution and design, the lack of any such artistic 
merit in another famous work of Middleton's is 
such as once more to excite that irritating sense 
of inequality, irregularity, inconstancy of genius 
and inconsequence of aim, which too often besets 
and bewilders the student of our early dramatists. 
There is poetry enough in "The Witch " to furnish 
forth a whole generation of poeticules: but the 
construction or composition of the play, the 
arrangement and evolution of event, the distinc- 
tion or development of character, would do less 
than little credit to a boy of twelve ; who at any 
rate would hardly have thought of patching up 
so ridiculous a reconciliation between intending 
murderers and intended victims as here exceeds in 
absurdity the chaotic combination of accident and 



172 THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

error which disposes of inconvenient or super- 
fluous underhngs. But though neither Mr. Dyce 
nor Mr. Bullen has been at all excessive or unjust 
in his animadversions on these flagrant faults and 
follies, neither editor has given his author due 
credit for the excellence of style, of language and 
versification, which makes this play readable 
throughout with pleasure, if not always without 
impatience. Fletcher himself, the acknowledged 
master of the style here adopted by Middleton, 
has left no finer example of metrical fluency and 
melodious ease. The fashion of dialogue and 
composition is no doubt rather feminine than 
masculine: Marlowe and Jonson, Webster and 
Beaumont, Toumeurand Ford — to cite none but 
the greatest of authorities in this kind — wrote a 
firmer if not a freer hand, struck a graver if not 
a sweeter note of verse: this rapid effluence of 
easy expression is liable to lapse into conventional 
efflux of facile improvisation : but such command 
of it as Middleton's is impossible to any but a 
genuine and a memorable poet. 

As for the supposed obligations of Shakespeare 
to Middleton or Middleton to Shakespeare, the 
imaginary relations of "The Witch" to "Mac- 
beth" or "Macbeth" to "The Witch," I can only 
say that the investigation of this subject seems to 
me as profitable as a research into the natural 



THOMAS MIDDLETON 173 

history of snakes in Iceland. That the editors 
to whom we owe the miserably defaced and 
villanously garbled text which is all that has 
reached us of "Macbeth," not content with the 
mutilation of the greater poet, had recourse to 
the interpolation of a few superfluous and in- 
congruous lines or fragments from the lyric por- 
tions of the lesser poet's work — that the players 
who mangled Shakespeare were the pilferers who 
plundered Middleton — must be obvious to all 
but those (if any such yet exist anywhere) who 
are capable of believing the unspeakably im- 
pudent assertion of those mendacious male- 
factors that they have left us a pure and perfect 
edition of Shakespeare. These passages are all 
thoroughly in keeping with the general tone of 
the lesser work: it would be tautology to add 
that they are no less utterly out of keeping with 
the general tone of the other. But in their own 
way nothing can be finer: they have a tragic 
liveliness in ghastliness, a grotesque animation of 
horror, which no other poet has ever conceived or 
conveyed to us. The difference between Michael 
Angelo and Goya, Tintoretto and Gustave Dore, 
does not quite efface the right of the minor artists 
to existence and remembrance. 

The strange and strangely beautiful tragic 
poem, which could not have come down to us 



174 THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

under a stupider or a less appropriate name than 
that apparently conferred on it by the licenser of 
"The Second Maiden's Tragedy," must by all 
evidence of internal and external probability be 
almost unquestionably assigned to the hand of 
Middleton. The masterly daring of the stage 
effect, which cannot or should not be mistaken for 
the merely theatrical audacity of a headlong im- 
pressionist at any price, is not more characteristic 
of the author than the tender and passionate 
fluency of the flawless verse. The rather eccen- 
tric intermittency of the supernatural action is a 
no less obviously plausible reason for assigning it 
to the creator of so realistic a witch and so sin- 
gular a succubus. But such a dramatic poem as 
this would be a conspicuous jewel in the crown of 
any but a supremely great dramatist and poet. 
And the musical or metrical harmony of the verse, 
imperceptible as it may be or rather must always 
be to the long-eared dunces who can only think 
to hear through their clumsy fingers, is so like 
Fletcher's as to suggest that if any part of Shake- 
speare's " King Henry VIII." is attributable to a 
lesser hand than his it may far more plausibly be 
assigned to Middleton's than to Fletcher's. Had 
it or could it have been the work of Fletcher, the 
clamorous and multitudinous satellites who pre- 
ferred him with such furious fatuity of acclama- 



THOMAS MIDDLETON 175 

tion to so inconsiderable a rival as Shakespeare 
would hardly have abstained from reclaiming it 
on behalf of the great poet whom it pleased their 
imbecility to set so far above one so immeasura- 
bly and so unutterably greater. 

The tragedy of "Women Beware Women," 
whether or not it be accepted as the masterpiece 
of Middleton, is at least an excellent example of 
the facility and fluency and equable promptitude 
of style which all students will duly appreciate 
and applaud in the riper and completer work of 
this admirable poet. It is full to overflowing of 
noble eloquence, of inventive resource and sug- 
gestive effect, of rhetorical affluence and theatrical 
ability. The opening or exposition of the play is 
quite masterly: and the scene in which the for- 
saken husband is seduced into consolation by the 
temptress of his wife is worthy of all praise for 
the straightforward ingenuity and the serious 
delicacy by which the action is rendered credible 
and the situation endurable. But I fear that few 
or none will be found to disagree with my opinion 
that no such approbation or tolerance can be 
reasonably extended so as to cover or condone 
the offences of either the underplot or the upshot 
of the play. The one is repulsive beyond redemp- 
tion by elegance of style, the other is preposter- 
ous beyond extenuation on the score of logical or 



176 THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

poetical justice. Those who object on principle 
to solution by massacre must object in consist- 
ency to the conclusions of "Hamlet" and "King 
Lear" ; nor are the results of Webster's tragic 
invention more questionable or less inevitable 
than the results of Shakespeare's: but the drag- 
net of murder which gathers in the characters at 
the close of this play is as promiscuous in its 
sweep as that cast by Cyril Toumeur over the 
internecine shoal of sharks who are hauled in 
and ripped open at the close of "The Revenger's 
Tragedy." Had Middleton been content with 
the admirable subject of his main action, he 
might have given us a simple and unimpeachable 
masterpiece: and even as it is he has left us a 
noble and memorable work. It is true that the 
irredeemable infamy of the leading characters 
degrades and deforms the nature of the interest 
excited: the good and gentle old mother whose 
affectionate simplicity is so gracefully and at- 
tractively painted passes out of the story and 
drops out of the list of actors just when some 
redeeming figure is most needed to assuage the 
dreariness of disgust with which we follow the 
fortunes of so meanly criminal a crew: and the 
splendid eloquence of the only other respectable 
person in the play is not of itself sufficient to 
make a living figure, rather than the mere mouth- 



THOMAS MIDDLETON 177 

piece for indignant emotion, of so subordinate 
and inactive a character as the Cardinal. The 
lower comedy of the play is identical in motive 
with that which defaces the master- work of Ford : 
more stupid and offensive it hardly could be. 
But the high comedy of the scene between Livia 
and the Widow is as fine as the best work in that 
kind left us by the best poets and humorists of 
the Shakespearean age ; it is not indeed unworthy 
of the comparison with Chaucer's which it sug- 
gested to the all but impeccable judgment of 
Charles Lamb. 

The lack of moral interest and sympathetic 
attraction in the characters and the story, which 
has been noted as the principal defect in the 
otherwise effective composition of "Women Be- 
ware Women," is an objection which cannot be 
brought against the graceful tragicomedy of 
"The Spanish Gipsy." Whatever is best in the 
tragic or in the romantic part of this play bears 
the stamp of Middleton's genius alike in the 
sentiment and the style. "The code of modem 
morals," to borrow a convenient phrase from 
Shelley, may hardly incline us to accept as 
plausible or as possible the repentance and the 
redemption of so brutal a ruffian as Roderigo: 
but the vivid beauty of the dialogue is equal to 
the vivid interest of the situation which makes 



1 78 THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

the first act one of the most striking in any play 
of the time. The double action has some lead- 
ing points in common with two of Fletcher's, 
which have nothing in common with each other: 
Merione in "The Queen of Corinth" is less in- 
teresting than Clara, but the vagabonds of 
"Beggars' Bush" are more amusing than Row- 
ley's or Middleton's. The play is somewhat de- 
ficient in firmness or solidity of construction : it is, 
if such a phrase be permissible, one of those half- 
baked or underdone dishes of various and con- 
fused ingredients, in which the cook's or the 
baker's hurry has impaired the excellent mate- 
rials of wholesome bread and savor^^ meat. The 
splendid slovens who served their audience with 
spiritual work in which the gods had mixed "so 
much of earth, so much of heaven, and such 
impetuous blood" — the generous and headlong 
purveyors who lavished on their daily provision 
of dramatic fare such wealth of fine material and 
such prodigality of superfluous grace — the fore- 
most followers of Marlowe and of Shakespeare 
were too prone to follow the impetuous example 
of the first rather than the severe example of the 
second. There is perhaps not one of them — and 
Middleton assuredly is not one — ^whom we can 
reasonably imagine capable of the patience and 
self-respect which induced Shakespeare to re- 



THOMAS MIDDLETON 179 

write the triumphantly popular parts of Romeo, 
of Falstaff , and of Hamlet with an eye to the lit- 
erary perfection and permanence of work which 
in its first light outline had won the crowning 
suffrage of immediate or spectacular applause. 

The rough-and-ready hand of Rowley may be 
traced, not indeed in the more high-toned pas- 
sages, but in many of the most animated scenes of 
' ' The Spanish Gipsy . " In the most remarkable of 
the ten masks or interludes which appear among 
the collected works of Middleton the two names 
are again associated. To the freshness, liveliness, 
and spirited ingenuity of this little allegorical 
comedy Mr. Bullen has done ample justice in 
his excellent critical introduction. "The Inner- 
Temple Masque," less elaborate than "The World 
Tost at Tennis," shows no lack of homely humor 
and invention : and in the others there is as much 
waste of fine flowing verse and facile fancy as ever 
excited the rational regret of a modem reader at 
the reckless profusion of literary power which the 
great poets of the time were content to lavish on 
the decoration or exposition of an ephemeral 
pageant. Of Middleton's other minor works, 
apocryphal or genuine, I will only say that his 
authorship of " Microcynicon " — a dull and crab- 
bed imitation of Marston's worst work as a satir- 
ist — seems to me utterly incredible. A lucid and 



i8o THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

melodious fluency of style is the mark of all his 
metrical writing ; and this stupid piece of obscure 
and clumsy jargon could have been the work of 
no man endowed with more faculty of expres- 
sion than informs or modulates the whine of 
an average pig. Nor is it rationally conceivable 
that the Thomas Middleton who soiled some 
reams of paper with what he was pleased to con- 
sider or to call a paraphrase of the "Wisdom of 
Solomon" can have had anything but a poet's 
name in common with a poet. This name is not 
like that of the great writer whose name is at- 
tached to "The Transformed Metamorphosis": 
there can hardly have been two Cyril Toumeurs 
in the field, but there may well have been half 
a dozen Thomas Middletons. And Toumeur's 
abortive attempt at allegoric discourse is but a 
preposterous freak of prolonged eccentricity: this 
paraphrase is simply a tideless and interminable 
sea of limitless and inexhaustible drivel. There 
are three reasons — two of them considerable, but 
the third conclusive — for assigning to Middleton 
the two satirical tracts in the style of Nash, or 
rather of Dekker, which appeared in the same 
year with his initials subscribed to their pref- 
atory addresses. Mr. Dyce thought they were 
written by the poet whose ready verse and 
realistic humor are both well represented in their 



THOMAS MIDDLETON i8i 

text: Mr. Bullen agrees with Mr. Dyce in think- 
ing that they are the work of Middleton. And 
Mr. Carew Hazlitt thinks that they are not. 

No such absolute and final evidence as this can 
be adduced in favor or disfavor of the theory 
which would saddle the reputation of Middleton 
with the authorship of a dull and disjointed 
comedy, the work (it has hitherto been supposed) 
of the German substitute for Shakespeare. Mid- 
dleton has no doubt left us more crude and 
shapeless plays than "The Puritan"; none, in 
my opinion — excepting always his very worst 
authentic example of farce or satire, "The Family 
of Love" — so heavy and so empty and so feeble. 
If it must be assigned to any author of higher 
rank than the new Shakespeare, I would suggest 
that it is much more like Rowley's than like 
Middleton's worst work. Of the best qualities 
which distinguish either of these writers as poet 
or as humorist, it has not the shadow or the 
glimmer of a vestige. 

In the last and the greatest work which bears 
their united names — a work which should suffice 
to make either name immortal if immortality 
were other than an accidental attribute of genius 
— the very highest capacity of either poet is seen 
at its very best. There is more of mere poetry, 
more splendor of style and vehemence of verbal 



i82 THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

inspiration, in the work of other poets then writ- 
ing for the stage: the two masterpieces of Web- 
ster are higher in tone at their highest, more im- 
aginative and more fascinating in their expres- 
sion of terrible or of piteous truth: there are 
more superb harmonies, more glorious raptures 
of ardent and eloquent music, in the sometimes 
unsurpassed and unsurpassable poetic passion of 
Cyril Toumeur. But even Webster's men seem 
but splendid sketches, as Toumeur's seem but 
shadowy or fiery outlines, beside the perfect and 
living figure of De Flores. The man is so horribly 
human, so fearfully and wonderfully natural, in 
his single-hearted brutality of devotion, his ab- 
solute absorption of soul and body by one con- 
suming force of passionately cynical desire, that 
we must go to Shakespeare for an equally original 
and an equally unquestionable revelation of in- 
dubitable truth. And in no play by Beaumont 
and Fletcher is the concord between the two 
partners more singularly complete in unity of 
spirit and of style than throughout the tragic 
part of this play. The underplot from which it 
most unluckily and absurdly derives its title is 
very stupid, rather coarse, and almost vulgar: 
but the two great parts of Beatrice and De Flores 
are equally consistent, coherent, and sustained 
in the scenes obviously written by Middleton and 



THOMAS MIDDLETON 183 

in the scenes obviously written by Rowley. The 
subordinate part taken by Middleton in Dekker's 
play of "The Honest Whore" is difficult to dis- 
cern from the context or to verify by inner evi- 
dence: though some likeness to his realistic or 
photographic method may be admitted as per- 
ceptible in the admirable picture of Bellafront's 
morning reception at the opening of the second 
act of the first part. But here we may assert 
with fair confidence that the first and the last 
scenes of the play bear the indisputable sign- 
manual of William Rowley. His vigorous and 
vivid genius, his somewhat hard and curt direct- 
ness of style and manner, his clear and trenchant 
power of straightforward presentation or exposi- 
tion, may be traced in every line as plainly as the 
hand of Middleton must be recognized in the main 
part of the tragic action intervening. To Rowley, 
therefore, must be assigned the very high credit of 
introducing and of dismissing with adequate and 
even triumphant effect the strangely original 
tragic figure which owes its fullest and finest de- 
velopment to the genius of Middleton. To both 
poets alike must unqualified and equal praise be 
given for the subtle simplicity of skill with which 
they make us appreciate the fatal and fore- 
ordained affinity between the ill-favored, rough- 
mannered, broken-down gentleman and the 



i84 THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

headstrong, unscrupulous, unobservant girl whose 
very abhorrence of him serves only to fling her 
down from her high station of haughty beauty 
into the very clutch of his ravenous and pitiless 
passion. Her cry of horror and astonishment at 
first perception of the price to be paid for a 
service she had thought to purchase with mere 
money is so wonderfully real in its artless and 
ingenuous sincerity that Shakespeare himself 
could hardly have bettered it: 

Why, 'tis impossible thou canst be so wicked, 

And shelter such a cunning cruelty, 

To make his death the murderer of my honor! 

That note of incredulous amazement that the 
man whom she has just instigated to the commis- 
sion of murder "can be so wicked" as to have 
served her ends for any end of his own beyond 
the pay of a professional assassin is a touch 
worthy of the greatest dramatist that ever lived. 
The perfect simplicity of expression is as notable 
as the perfect innocence of her surprise; the 
candid astonishment of a nature absolutely in- 
capable of seeing more than one thing or holding 
more than one thought at a time. That she, the 
first criminal, should be honestly shocked as well 
as physically horrified by revelation of the real 
motive which impelled her accomplice into crime, 



THOMAS MIDDLETON 185 

gives a lurid streak of tragic humor to the life- 
like interest of the scene ; as the pure infusion of 
spontaneous poetry throughout redeems the whole 
work from the charge of vulgar subservience to 
a vulgar taste for the presentation or the con- 
templation of criminal horror. Instances of this 
happy and natural nobility of instinct abound in 
the casual expressions which give grace and ani- 
mation always, but never any touch of rhetorical 
transgression or florid superfluity, to the brief 
and trenchant sword-play of the tragic dialogue : 

That sigh wotold fain have utterance: take pity on't, 
And lend it a free word; 'las, how it labors 
For liberty! I hear the murmur yet 
Beat at your bosom. 

The wording of this passage is sufficient to 
attest the presence and approve the quality of a 
poet : the manner and the moment of its introduc- 
tion would be enough to show the instinctive and 
inborn insight of a natural dramatist. As much 
may be said of the few words which give us a 
ghostly glimpse of supernatural terror: 

Ha! what art thou that tak'st away the light 
Betwixt that star and me! I dread thee not: 
'Twas but a mist of conscience. 

But the real power and genius of the work 
cannot be shown by extracts — not even by such 



i86 THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

extracts as these. His friend and colleague 
Dekker shows to better advantage by the proc- 
ess of selection: hardly one of his plays leaves 
so strong and sweet an impression of its general 
and complete excellence as of separate scenes or 
passages of tender and delicate imagination or 
emotion beyond the reach of Middleton: but the 
tragic unity and completeness of conception 
which distinguish this masterpiece will be sought 
in vain among the less firm and solid figures of 
his less serious and profound invention. Had 
"The Changeling" not been preserved, we should 
not have known Middleton: as it is, we are more 
than justified in asserting that a critic who denies 
him a high place among the poets of England 
must be not merely ignorant of the qualities 
which involve a right or confer a claim to this 
position, but incapable of curing his ignorance 
by any process of study. The rough and rapid 
work which absorbed too much of this poet's 
time and toil seems almost incongruous with the 
impression made by the noble and thoughtful 
face, so full of gentle dignity and earnest com- 
posure, in which we recognize the graver and 
loftier genius of a man worthy to hold his own 
beside all but the greatest of his age. And that 
age was the age of Shakespeare. 



WILLIAM ROWLEY 

Of all the poets and humorists who lit up the 
London stage for half a century of unequalled 
glory, William Rowley was the most thoroughly 
loyal Londoner: the most evidently and proudly 
mindful that he was a citizen of no mean city. I 
have always thought that this must have been the 
conscious or unconscious source of the strong and 
profound interest which his very remarkable and 
original genius had the good -fortune to evoke 
from the sympathies oi Charles Lamb. That 
divine cockney, if the word may be used — and 
"why in the name of glory," to borrow the phrase 
of another immortal fellow -townsman, should 
it not be? — as a term of no less honor than 
Yorkshireman or Northumbrian, Cornishman or 
Welshman, has lavished upon Rowley such cor- 
dial and such manfully sympathetic praise as 
would suffice to preserve and to immortalize 
the name of a far lesser man and a far feebler 
workman in tragedy or comedy, poetry or prose. 

If Lamb had known and read the first work 



i88 THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

published by Rowley, it is impossible to imagine 
that it would not have been honored by the 
tribute of some passing and priceless word. Why 
it has never been reissued (except in a private 
reprint for the Percy Society) among the many 
less deserving and less interesting revivals from 
the apparently and not really ephemeral litera- 
ture of its day would be to me an insoluble 
problem, if I were so ignorant as never to have 
realized the too obvious fact that chance, pure 
and simple chance, guides or misguides the in- 
telligence, and suggests or fails to suggest, the 
duty of scholars and of students who have given 
time and thought to such far from unimportant 
or insignificant matters. "A Search for Money; 
or, a Quest for the Wandering Knight Monsieur 
L' Argent," is not comparable with the best 
pamphlets of Nash or of Dekker: a competent 
reader of those admirable improvisations will at 
the first opening feel inclined to regard it as a 
feeble and servile imitation of their quaint and 
obsolescent manner; but he will soon find an 
original and a vigorous vein of native humor in 
their comrade or their disciple. The seekers af- 
ter the wandering knight, baffled in their search 
on shore, are compelled to recognize the sad fact 
that "the sea is lunatic, and mad folks keep no 
money, he would sink if he were there." The 



WILLIAM ROWLEY 189 

description of an usurer is memorable by its 
reference to the first great poet of England, 
among whose followers Rowley is far from the 
least worthy of honor. ' ' His visage (or vizard) , 
like the artificial Jew of Malta's nose," brings 
before the reader in vivid realism the likeness of 
Alleyn or Burbage as he represented in grotesque 
and tragic disguise the magnificent figure of 
Marlowe's creative invention or discovery by 
dint of genius. (I do not remember the curious 
verb "to rand" except in this little book: "he 
randed out these sentences": I presume it to be 
the first form of "rant.") The account of St. 
Paul's in 1609 is very curious and scandalous: 
' ' the very Temple itself (in bare humility) stood 
without his cap, and so had stood many years, 
many good folks had spoke for him because he 
could not speak for himself, and somewhat had 
been gathered in his behalf, but not half enough 
to supply his necessity." 

When we pass from "the Temple" to West- 
minster Hall we come upon a sample of humor 
which would be famous if it were the gift of a less 
ungratefully forgotten hand. 

"Here were two brothers at buffets with angels 
in their fists about the thatch that blew off his 
house into the other's garden and so spoiled a 
Hartichoke." 



I90 THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

It should not have been left to a later hand — 
it should surely have been the privilege of Lamb's 
or Hazlitt's, and perhaps rather Hazlitt's than 
even Lamb's — to unearth and to transcribe the 
quaint and spirited description of Thames water- 
men "howling, hollowing, and calling for pas- 
sengers, as if all the hags in hell had been im- 
prisoned, and begging at the gate, fiends and 
furies that (God be thanked) could vex the soul 
but not torment it, yet indeed their most power 
was over the body, for here an audacious mouth- 
ing - randing - impudent - scullery - wastecoat-and- 
bodied rascal would have hail'd a penny from 
us for his scullerships." 

Could Rabelais himself have described them 
better, or with vigor of humorous expression 
more heartily and enjoyably characteristic of his 
own all but incomparable genius? 

The good old times, as remote in Shake- 
speare's day as in our own, were never more 
delightfully described than by Rowley in this 
noble and simple phrase: "Then was England's 
whole year but a St. George's day." 

Webster wished that what he wrote might be 
read by the light of Shakespeare: an admirer of 
Rowley might hope and must wish that he should 
be read by the light of Lamb. His comedies 
have real as well as realistic merit: not equal to 



WILLIAM ROWLEY 



-91 



that'of Dekker's or Middleton's at their best, but 
usually not far inferior to Heywood's or to theirs. 
The first of them, "A New Wonder: A Woman 
Never Vext," has received such immortal honor 
from the loving hand of Lamb that perhaps the 
one right thing to say of it would be an adapta- 
tion of a Catholic formula: "Agnus locutus est: 
causa finita est." The realism is so thorough as to 
make the interest something more than historical : 
and historically it is so valuable as well as amus- 
ing that a reasonable student may overlook the 
offensive "mingle-mangle" of prose and verse 
which cannot but painfully affect the nerves of 
all not congenitally insensitive readers, as it sure- 
ly must have ground and grated on the ears of an 
audience accustomed to enjoy the prose as well as 
the verse of Shakespeare and his kind. No graver 
offence can be committed or conceived by a 
writer with any claim to any but contemptuous 
remembrance than this debasement of the cur- 
rency of verse. 

The character of Robert Foster is so noble and 
attractive in its selfless and manful simplicity that 
it gives us and leaves with us a more cordial sense 
of sympathetic regard and respect for his creator 
than we could feel if this gallant and homely 
figure were withdrawn from the stage of his in- 
vention. The female Polycrates who suffers uu- 



192 THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

dcr the curse of inevitable and intolerable good- 
fortune is an admirable creature of broad comedy 
that never subsides or overflows or degenerates 
into farce. 

"A Match at Midnight" is as notable for vivid 
impression of reality, but not so likely to leave a 
good taste — as Charlotte Bronte might have said 
— in the reader's mouth. Ancient Young, the 
hero, is a fine fellow; but Messrs. Earlack and 
Carvegut are hardly amusing enough to reconcile 
us to toleration of such bad company. It is 
cleverly composed, and the crosses and chances of 
the night are ingeniously and effectively invented 
and arranged: there is real and good broad 
humor in the parts of the usurer and his sons 
and the attractive but unwidowed Widow Wag. 
And I am not only free to admit but desirous to 
remark that a juster and more valuable judg- 
ment on such plays as these than any that I 
could undertake to deliver may very possibly be 
expected from readers whom they may more 
thoroughly arride — to use a favorite phrase of 
the all but impeccable critic, the all but infallible 
judge, whose praise has set the name of Rowley 
so high in the rank of realistic painters and 
historic naturalists forever. 

The copies of two dramatic nondescripts now 
happily preserved and duly treasured in the 



WILLIAM ROWLEY 193 

library of the British Museum bear inscribed in 
the same old hand, at the head of the first page 
and again on the last page under the last line, 
the same contemptuous three words — "silly old 
story." And I fear it can hardly be maintained 
that either Chapman, when writing "The Blind 
Beggar of Alexandria," or Rowley, when writing 
"A Shoemaker, a Gentleman," was engaged in 
any very rational or felicitous employment of his 
wayward and unregulated powers . ' ' The Printer' ' 
of the play last named assures "the Reader" 
of 1638, whom he assumes to be a member of the 
gentle craft, that "as plays were then, some 
twenty years agone, it was in the fashion." A 
singular fashion, the rare modem reader will 
probably reflect: especially when he remembers 
how far finer and how thoroughly charming a 
tribute of dramatic and poetic celebration had 
been paid full eighteen years earlier to the same 
favored craft by the sweeter and rarer genius of 
Dekker. This quaintly apologetic assurance of 
by-gone popularity in subject and in style will 
remind all probable readers of Heywood's pro- 
logue to "The Royal King and Loyal Subject," 
and his dedicatory address prefixed to "The Four 
Prentices of London." It happily was not, how- 
ever, in the printer's power to aver that such 
impudently immetrical verse as Rowley at once 



194 THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

breaks ground with was ever in fashion with any 
of his famous fellows. Nothing can be worse 
than the headlong and slipshod stumble of 
Dekker's at its worst; but his were the faults 
of hurry and impatience and shamefully scamped 
work: Rowley's, if I mistake not, is the far graver 
error of a preposterous theory that broken verse, 
rough and untunable as the shock of short chop- 
ping waves, is more dramatic and liker the natural 
speech of men and women than the rolling and 
flowing verse of Marlowe and of Shakespeare: 
which is as much liker life as it is nobler and 
more satisfying in workmanship. In reading 
bad verse the reader is constantly reminded that 
he is not reading good prose; and this is not 
the effect produced by true realism — the impres- 
sion left by actual intercourse or faithful presen- 
tation of it. 

The hagiology of this eccentric play is more 
like Shirley's in "St. Patrick for Ireland" than 
Dekker's and Massinger's in "The Virgin Martyr." 
Assuredly there is here nothing like the one in- 
comparably lovely dialogue of Dorothea with her 
attendant angel. But there is the charm of a 
curious simplicity and sincerity in Rowley's 
straightforward and homely dramatic handling 
of the supernatural element: in the miracle of 
St. Winifred's well, and the conversion of Albon 



WILLIAM ROWLEY 195 

into St. Alban by "that seminary knight," as the 
tyrant Maximinus rather comically calls him, 
Amphiabel Prince of Wales. The courtship of 
the princely Offa, while disguised as the shoe- 
maker's apprentice Crispinus, by the Roman 
Princess Laodice, daughter of Maximinus, is very 
lively and dramatic: the sprightliest scene, I 
should say, ever played out on the stage of 
Rowley's fancy. On the other hand, the martyr- 
dom of St. Winifred and St. Hugh is an abject 
tragic failure ; an abortive attempt at cheap terror 
and jingling pity, followed up by doggrel farce of 
intolerable grossness. 

This play is a perfect repertory of slang and 
quaint phrases: as when the master shoemaker, 
who has for apprentices two persecuted princes 
in disguise, and is a very inferior imitation of 
Dekker's admirable Simon Eyre, calls his wife 
Lady d'Oliva — whatever that may mean, and 
when she inquires of one of the youngsters, 
"What's the matter, boy? Why are so many 
chancery bills drawn in thy face?" Habent sua 
fata lihelli: it is inexplicable that this most curious 
play should never have been republished, when 
the volumes of Dodsley's Old Plays, in their very 
latest reissue, are encumbered with heaps of such 
leaden dulness and such bestial filth as no de- 
cent scavenger and no rational nightman would 



196 THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

have dreamed of sweeping back into sight and 
smell of any possible reader. 

But it is or it should be inconceivable and in- 
credible that the masterpiece of Rowley's strong 
and singular genius, a play remarkable for its 
peculiar power or fusion of strange powers even 
in the sovereign age of Shakespeare, should have 
waited upward of three hundred years and 
should still be waiting for the appearance of a 
second edition. The tragedy of "All's Lost by 
Lust," published in the same year with Shake- 
speare's great posthumous torso of romantic 
tragedy, was evidently a favorite child of its 
author's: the terse and elaborate argument sub- 
joined to the careful and exhaustive list of charac- 
ters may suffice to prove it. Among these char- 
acters we may note that one, "a simple clown- 
ish Gentleman," was "personated by the poet": 
and having noted it, we cannot but long, with a 
fruitless longing, for such confidences as to the 
impersonation of the leading characters in other 
memorable plays of the period. There is some 
really good rough humor in the part of this honest 
clown and his fellows; but no duly appreciative 
reader will doubt that the author's heart was in 
the work devoted to the tragic and poetic scenes 
of a play which shows that the natural bent of his 
powers was toward tragedy rather than comedy. 



WILLIAM ROWLEY 197 

Alike as poet and as dramatist, lie rises far higher 
and enjoys his work far more when the aim of his 
flight is toward the effects of imaginative terror 
and pity than when it is confined to the effects of 
• humorous or pathetic realism. In the very first 
scene we breathe the air of tragic romance and 
imminent evil provoked by coalition rather than 
collision of the will of man with the doom of 
destiny; and the king's defiance of prophecy and 
tradition is so admirably rendered or suggested as 
a sign of brutal and egotistic rather than chival- 
rous or manful daring as to prepare the way with 
great dramatic and poetic skill for the subsequent 
scenes of attempted seduction and ultimate viola- 
tion. With these the underplot, interesting and 
original in itself, well conceived and well carried 
through, is happily and naturally interwoven. 
The noble soliloquy of the invading and defeated 
Moorish king is by grace of Lamb familiar to 
all true lovers of the higher dramatic poetry of 
England. Nothing can be livelier and more 
natural than the scenes in which a recent bride- 
groom's heart is won from his loving and low- 
bom wife by the offered hand and the sprightly 
seductions of a light-hearted and high-bom rival. 
But the crowning scene of the play and the crown- 
ing grace of the poem is the interview of father 
and daughter after the consummation of the crime 



198 THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

which gave Spain into the hand of the Moor. 
The vivid dramatic Hfe in every word is even 
more admirable than the great style, the high 
poetic spirit of the scene. I have always ventured 
to wonder that Lamb, whose admiration has made 
it twice immortal, did not select as a companion 
or a counterpart to it that other great camp 
scene from Webster's "Appius and Virginia" in 
which another outraged warrior and father stirs 
up his friends and fellow-soldiers to vindication 
of his honor and revenge for his wrong. It is 
surely even finer and more impressive than that 
selected in preference to it, which closes with the 
immolation of Virginia. 

The scenes in which the tragic underplot of 
Rowley's tragedy is deftly and effectively wound 
up are full of living action and passion; that 
especially in which the revenge of a deserted wife 
is wreaked mistakingly on the villanous minion 
to whose instigation she owes the infidelity of the 
husband for whom she mistakes him. The gross 
physical horrors which deform the close of a 
noble poem are relieved if not beautified by the 
great style of its age — an age unparalleled in 
wealth and variety of genius, a style unmatchable 
for its union of inspired and imaginative dignity 
with actual and vivid reality of impassioned and 
lofty life, 



WILLIAM ROWLEY 199 

No comparison is possible, nor if possible could 
it be profitable, between the somewhat rough- 
hewn English oak of Rowley's play and the flaw- 
less Roman steel of Landor's great Miltonic 
tragedy on the same subject. The fervent praise 
of Southey was not too generous to be just in its 
estimate of that austere masterpiece ; it is lament- 
able to remember the injustice of its illustrious 
author to the men of Shakespeare's day. I fear 
he would certainly not have excepted the noble 
work of his precursor from his general condemna- 
tion or impreachment of ' ' their bloody bawdries ' ' 
— a mis judgment gross enough for Hallam — or 
Voltaire when declining to the level of a Hallam. 
Landor was as headlong as these were hidebound, 
as fitful as they were futile ; but not even the dis- 
praise or the disrelish of a finer if not of a greater 
dramatic poet could affect the credit or impair 
the station of one on whose merits the final 
sentence of appreciation has been irrevocably 
pronounced by the verdict of Charles Lamb. 



THOMAS HEYWOOD 

If it is difficult to write at all on any subject 
once ennobled by the notice of Charles Lamb 
without some apprehensive sense of intrusion and 
presumption, least of all may we venture without 
fear of trespass upon ground so consecrated by 
his peculiar devotion as the spacious if homely 
province or demesne of the dramatist whose 
highest honor it is to have earned from the finest 
of all critics the crowning tribute of a sympathy 
which would have induced him to advise an in- 
tending editor or publisher of the dramatists of 
the Shakespearean age to begin by a reissue of the 
works of Hey wood. The depth and width of his 
knowledge, the subtlety and the sureness of his 
intuition, place him so far ahead of any other 
critic or scholar who has ever done any stroke of 
work in any part of the same field that it may 
seem overbold for any such subordinate to express 
or to suggest a suspicion that this counsel would 
have been rather the expression of a personal and 
a partly accidental sympathy than the result of a 



THOMAS HEYWOOD 201 

critical and a purely rational consideration. And 
yet I can hardly think it questionable that it must 
have been less the poetic or essential merit than 
the casual or incidental associations of Hey- 
wood's work which excited so exceptional an 
enthusiasm in so excellent a judge. For as a 
matter of fact it must be admitted that in one 
instance at least the objections of the carper 
Hazlitt are better justified than the commenda- 
tions of the finer and more appreciative critic. 
The rancorous democrat who shared with Byron 
the infamy of sympathetic admiration for the 
enemy of England and the tyrant of France 
found for once an apt and a fair occasion to vent 
his spleen against the upper classes of his coun- 
trymen in criticism of the underplot of Hey- 
wood's most celebrated play. Lamb, thinking 
only of the Frankfords, Wincotts, and Geraldines, 
whose beautiful and noble characters are the 
finest and surest witnesses to the noble and 
beautiful nature of their designer's, observes that 
"Hey wood's characters, his country gentlemen, 
etc., are exactly what we see (but of the best kind 
of what we see) in life." But such country gentle- 
men as his Actons and Mountfords are surely of 
a worse than the worst kind ; more cruel or more 
irrational, more base or more perverse, than we 
need fear to see in life unless our experience should 



202 THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

be exceptionally unfortunate. Lamb indeed is 
rather an advocate than a judge in the case of his 
fellow-Londoners Thomas Hey\VDod and William 
Rowley ; but his pleading is better worth our at- 
tention than the summing up of a less cordial or 
less competent critic. 

From critics or students who regard with an 
academic smile of cultivated contempt the love for 
their country or the faith in its greatness which 
distinguished such poor creatures as Virgil and 
Dante, Shakespeare and Milton, Coleridge and 
Wordsworth, no tolerance can be expected for the 
ingrained and inveterate provinciality of a poet 
whose devotion to his homestead was not merely 
that of an Englishman but that of a Londoner, no 
less fond and proud of his city than of his country. 
The quaint, homely, single-hearted municipal 
loyalty of an old-world burgess, conscious of his 
station as "a citizen of no mean city," and proud 
even of the insults which provincials might fling 
at him as a cockney or aristocrats as a tradesman, 
is so admirably and so simply expressed in the 
person of Heywood's first hero — the first in date, 
at all events, with whom a modern reader can 
hope to make acquaintance — that the nobly 
plebeian pride of the city poet is as unmistakably 
personal as the tenderness of the dramatic artist 
who has made the last night of the little princes 



THOMAS HEYWOOD 203 

in the Tower as terribly and pathetically real for 
the reader as Millais has made it for the specta- 
tor of the imminent tragedy. Why Shakespeare 
shrank from the presentation of it, and left to a 
humbler hand the tragic weight of a subject so 
charged with tenderness and terror, it might 
seem impertinent or impossible to conjecture— 
except to those who can perceive and appreciate 
the intense and sensitive love of children which 
may haply have made the task distasteful if 
not intolerable: but it is certain that even he 
could hardly have made the last words of the 
little fellows more touchingly and sweetly lifelike. 
Were there nothing further to commend in 
the two parts of the historical play or chronicle 
history of " King Edward IV.," this would suffice 
to show that the dramatic genius of Heywood was 
not unjustified of its early and perilous venture ; 
but the hero of these two plays is no royal or 
noble personage, he is plain Matthew Shore the 
goldsmith. We find ourselves at once in what 
Coleridge would have called the anachronic at- 
mosphere of Elizabethan London; our poet is a 
champion cockney, whose interest is really much 
less in the rise and fall of princes than in the 
homely loyalty of shopkeepers and the sturdy 
gallantry of their apprentices. The lively, easy, 
honest improvisation of the opening scenes has a 



204 THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

certain value in its very crudity and simplicity: 
the homespun rhetoric and the jog-trot jingle are 
signs at once of the date and of the class to which 
these plays must be referred. The parts of the 
rebels are rough-hewn rather than vigorous; the 
comic or burlesque part of Josselin is very cheap 
and flimsy farce. The peculiar powers of Hey- 
wood in pathetic if not in humorous writing were 
still in abeyance or in embryo. Pathos there is 
of a true and manly kind in the leading part of 
Shore ; but it has little or nothing of the poignant 
and intense tenderness with which Heywood was 
afterward to invest the similar part of Frank- 
ford. Humor there is of a genuine plain-spun 
kind in the scenes which introduce the King 
as the guest of the tanner; Hobs and his sur- 
roundings, Grudgen and Goodfellow, are present- 
ed with a comic and cordial fidelity which the 
painter of Falstaff 's ' ' villeggiatura, ' ' the creator of 
Shallow, Silence, and Davy, might justly and con- 
ceivably have approved. It is rather in the more 
serious or ambitious parts that we find now and 
then a pre-Shakespearean immaturity of man- 
ner. The recurrent burden of a jingling couplet 
in the cajoleries of the procuress Mrs. Blague is a 
survival from the most primitive and conven- 
tional form of dramatic writing not yet thorough- 
ly superseded and suppressed by the successive 



THOMAS HEYWOOD 205 

influences of Marlowe, of Shakespeare, and of 
Jonson ; while the treatment of character in such 
scenes as that between Clarence, Richard, and 
Dr. Shaw is crude and childish enough for a 
rival contemporary of Peele. The beautiful and 
simple part of Ay re, a character worthy to have 
been glorified by the mention and commenda- 
tion of Heywood's most devoted and most illus- 
trious admirer, is typical of the qualities which 
Lamb seems to have found most lovable in the 
representative characters of his favorite play- 
wright. 

In that prodigious monument of learning and 
labor, Mr. Fleay's Biographical Chronicle of the 
English Drama, the common attribution of these 
two plays to Heywood is impeached on the 
aesthetic score that ' ' they are far better than his 
other early work." I have carefully endeavored 
to do what justice might be done to their modest 
allowance of moderate merit; but whether they 
be Heywood's or — as Mr. Fleay, on apparent 
grounds of documentary evidence, would suggest 
— the work of Chettle and Day, I am certainly 
rather inclined to agree with the general verdict 
of previous criticism, which would hardly admit 
their equality and would decidedly question their 
claim to anything more than equality of merit 
with the least admirable or memorable of Hey- 



2o6 THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

wood's other plays. Even the rough-hewn chron- 
icle, "If you know not me you know nobody," 
by which "the troubles of Queen Elizabeth" 
before her accession are as nakedly and simply 
set forth in the first part as in the second are 
"the building of the Royal Exchange" and "the 
famous victory" over the Invincible Armada, 
has on the whole more life and spirit, more in- 
terest and movement, in action as in style. The 
class of play to which it belongs is historically 
the most curious if poetically the least precious 
of all the many kinds enumerated by Heywood 
in earnest or by Shakespeare in jest as popular or 
ambitious of popularity on the stage for which 
they wrote. Aristophanic license of libel or cari- 
cature, more or less ineffectually trammelled by 
the chance or the likelihood of prosecution and 
repression, is common under various forms to 
various ages and countries ; but the serious intro- 
duction and presentation of contemporary figures 
and events give to such plays as these as mixed 
and peculiar a quality as though the playwright's 
aim or ambition had been to unite in his humble 
and homespun fashion the two parts of an epic or 
patriotic historian and a political or social cari- 
caturist; a poet and a pamphleteer on the same 
page, a chronicler and a jester in the same breath. 
Of this Elizabethan chronicle the first part is the 



THOMAS HEYWOOD 207 

more literal and. prosaic in its steady servility to 
actual record and registered fact: the bitterest 
enemy of poetic or dramatic fiction, from William 
Prynne to Thomas Carlyle, might well exempt 
from his else omnivorous appetite of censure 
so humble an example of such obsequious and 
unambitious fidelity. Of fiction or imagination 
there is indeed next to none. In Thomas Drue's 
play of "The Duchess of Suffolk," formerly and 
plausibly misattributed to Hey wood, part of the 
same ground is gone over in much the same 
fashion and to much the same effect; but the 
subject, a single interlude of the Marian per- 
secution, has more unity of interest than can be 
attained by any play running on the same line 
as Heywood's, from the opening to the close of 
the most hideous episode in our history. That 
the miserable life and reign of Mary Tudor should 
have been "staged to the show" for the edifica- 
tion and confirmation of her half-sister's subjects 
in Protestant and patriotic fidelity of animosity 
toward Rome and Spain is less remarkable than 
that the same hopelessly improper topic for his- 
torical drama should in later days have been 
selected for dramatic treatment by English writ- 
ers and on one occasion by a great English poet. 
As there are within the range of any country's 
history, authentic or traditional, periods and 



2o8 THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

characters in themselves so naturally fit and 
proper for transfiguration by poetry that the 
dramatist who should attempt to improve on the 
truth — the actual or imaginary truth accepted 
as fact with regard to them — would probably if 
not certainly derogate from it, so are there oth- 
ers which cannot be transfigured without trans- 
formation. Such a character is the last and 
wretchedest victim of a religious reaction which 
blasted her kingdom with the hell-fire of reviving 
devil-worship, and her name with the ineffaceable 
brand of an inseparable and damning epithet. 
If even the genius of Tennyson could not make 
the aspirations and the agonies of Mary as ac- 
ceptable or endurable from the dramatic or poetic 
point of view as Marlowe and Shakespeare could 
make the sufferings of such poor wretches as their 
Edward II. and Richard II., it is hardly to be 
expected that the humbler if more dramatic 
genius of Heywood should have triumphed over 
the desperate obstacle of a subject so drearily 
repulsive : but it is curious that both should have 
attempted to tackle the same hopeless task in the 
same fruitless fashion. The "chronicle history" 
of Mary Tudor, had Shakespeare's self attempted 
it, could scarcely have been other — if we may 
judge by our human and fallible lights of the 
divine possibilities open to a superhuman and 



THOMAS HEYWOOD 209 

infallible intelligence — than a splendid and price- 
less failure from the dramatic or poetic point of 
view. The one chance open even to Shake- 
speare would have been to invent, to devise, to 
create ; not to modify, to adapt, to adjust. Bloody 
Mary has been transfigured into a tragic and 
poetic malef actress : but only by the most au- 
dacious and magnificent defiance of history and 
possibility. Madonna Lucrezia Estense Borgia 
(to use the proper ceremonial style adopted for 
the exquisitely tender and graceful dedication of 
the "Asolani") died peaceably in the odor of 
incense offered at her shrine in the choicest Latin 
verse of such accomplished poets and acolytes 
as Pietro Bembo and Ercole Strozzi. Nothing 
more tragic or dramatic could have been made 
of her peaceful and honorable end than of the 
reign of Mary Tudor as recorded in history. The 
greatest poet and dramatist of the nineteenth 
century has chosen to immortalize them by 
violence — to give them a life, or to give a life 
to their names, which history could not give. 
Neither he nor Shakespeare could have kept 
faith with the torpid fact and succeeded in the 
creation of a living and eternal truth. One thing 
may be registered to the credit, not indeed of 
the dramatist or the poet, but certainly of the 
man and the Englishman : the generous fair play 



2IO THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

shown to Philip 11, in the scene which records 
his impartial justice done upon the Spanish as- 
sassin of an English victim. There is a charac- 
teristic manliness about Hey wood's patriotism 
which gives a certain adventitious interest to his 
thinnest or homeliest work on any subject admit- 
ting or requiring the display of such a quality. In 
the second and superior part of this dramatic 
chronicle it informs the humbler comic parts with 
more life and spirit, though not with heartier 
devotion of good-will, than the more ambitious 
and comparatively though modestly high-flown 
close of the play: which is indeed in the main 
rather a realistic comedy of city life, with forced 
and formal interludes of historical pageant or 
event, than a regular or even an irregular his- 
torical drama. Again the trusty cockney poet 
has made his hero and protagonist of a plain 
London tradesman : and has made of him at once 
a really noble and a heartily amusing figure. 
His better-boni apprentice, a sort of Elizabethan 
Gil Bias or Gusman d'Alfarache, would be an 
excellent comic character if he had been a little 
more plausibly carried through to the close of his 
versatile and venturous career; as it is, the farce 
becomes rather impudently cheap ; though in the 
earlier passages of Parisian trickery and buf- 
foonery there is a note of broad humor which 



THOMAS HEYWOOD 211 

may remind us of Moliere — not of course the 
Moliere of Tartuffe, but the Moliere of M. de 
Pourceaugnac. The curious alterations made in 
later versions of the closing scene are sometimes 
though not generally for the better. 

Lamb, in a passage which no reader can fail to 
remember, has declared that "posterity is bound 
to take care" (an obligation, I fear, of a kind 
which posterity is very far from careful to dis- 
charge) "that a writer loses nothing by such a 
noble modesty" as that which induced Heywood 
to set as little store by his dramatic works as 
could have been desired in the rascally interest of 
those ' ' harlotry players ' ' who thought it, forsooth, 
"against their peculiar profit to have them come 
in print." But I am not sure that it was altogether 
a noble or at all a rational modesty which made 
him utter the avowal or the vaunt: "It never 
was any great ambition in me, to be in this kind 
voluminously read." For, eight years after this 
well-known passage was in print, when publish- 
ing a " Chronographicall History of all the Kings, 
and memorable passages of this Kingdome, from 
Brute to the Reigne of our Royall Soveraigne 
King Charles," he offers, on arriving at the ac- 
cession of Elizabeth, "an apologie of the Author" 
for slurring or skipping the record of her life and 
times in a curious passage which curiously omits 



2X2 THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

as unworthy of mention his dramatic work on 
the subject, while complacently enumerating his 
certainly less valuable and memorable other 
tributes to the great queen's fame as follows: 
"To write largely of her troubles, being a prin- 
cesse, or of her rare and remarkable Reigne after 
she was Queen, I should but feast you with dyet 
twice drest : Having my self e published a discourse 
of the first : from her cradle to her crowne ; and 
in another bearing Title of the nine worthy 
Women: she being the last of the rest in time 
and place; though equall to any of the former 
both in religious vertue, and all masculine mag- 
nanimity." This surely looks but too much as 
though the dramatist and poet thought more of 
the chronicler and compiler than of the truer 
Heywood whose name is embalmed in the af- 
fection and admiration of his readers even to 
this day; as though the author of "A Challenge 
for Beauty," "The Fair Maid of the West," and 
"A Woman Killed with Kindness," must have 
hoped and expected to be remembered rather as 
the author of "Troja Britannica," 'TwaiKe'tov,'' 
"The Hierarchic of the Blessed Angels," and even 
this "Life of Merlin, simamed Ambrosius. His 
Prophesies, and Predictions Interpreted; and 
their truth made good by our English Annalls": 
undoubtedly, we may believe, "a Subject never 



THOMAS HEYWOOD 213 

published in this kind before, and deserves" (sic) 
"to be knowne and observed by all men." Here 
follows the motto: "Quotque aderant Vates, re- 
bar adesse Deos." The biographer and chronog- 
rapher would apparently have been less flattered 
than surprised to hear that he would be remem- 
bered rather as the creator of Frankford, Mount- 
ferrers, and Geraldine, than as the chronicler of 
King Brute, Queen Elizabeth, and King James. 
The singular series of plays which covers 
much the same ground as Caxton's immortal and 
delightful chronicle of the "Histories" of Troy 
may of course have been partially inspired by 
that most enchanting "recuyell": but Hey wood, 
as will appear on collation or confrontation of the 
dramatist with the historian, must have found 
elsewhere the suggestion of some of his most 
effective episodes. The excellent simplicity and 
vivacity of style, the archaic abruptness of action 
and presentation, are equally noticeable through- 
out all the twenty-five acts which lead us from 
the opening of the Golden to the close of the Iron 
Age ; but there is a no less perceptible advance or 
increase of dramatic and poetic invention in the 
ten acts devoted to the tale of Troy and its sequel. 
Not that there is anywhere any want of good 
simple spirited work, homely and lively and ap- 
propriate to the ambitious humility of the de- 



214 THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

sign ; a design which aims at making popular and 
familiar to the citizens of Elizabethan London 
the whole cycle of heroic legend from the reign of 
Saturn to the death of Helen. Jupiter, the young 
hero of the first two plays and ages, is a really 
brilliant and amusing mixture of Amadis, Sigurd, 
and Don Juan: the pretty scene in which his 
infant life is spared and saved must be familiar, 
and pleasantly familiar, to all worthy lovers of 
Charles Lamb. The verse underlined and immor- 
talized by his admiration — "For heaven's sake, 
when you kill him, hurt him not" — should suffice 
to preserve and to embalm the name of the writer. 
I can scarcely think that a later scene, apparently 
imitated from the most impudent idyl of Theocri- 
tus, can have been likely to elevate the moral 
tone of the young gentleman who must have 
taken the part of Callisto ; but the honest laureate 
of the city, stern and straightforward as he was in 
the enforcement of domestic duties and con- 
temporary morals, could be now and then as 
audacious in his plebeian fashion as even Fletcher 
himself in his more patrician style of realism. 
There is spirit of a quiet and steady kind in the 
scenes of war and adventure that follow: Hey- 
wood, like Caxton before him, makes of Saturn 
and the Titans very human and simple figures, 
whose doings and sufferings are presented with 



THOMAS HEYWOOD 215 

child-like straightforwardness in smooth and flu- 
ent verse and in dialogue which wants neither 
strength nor ease nor propriety. The subse- 
quent episode of Danae is treated with such frank 
and charming fusion of realism and romance as 
could only have been achieved in the age of 
Shakespeare. To modem readers it may seem 
unfortunate for Heywood that a poet who never 
(to the deep and universal regret of all com- 
petent readers) followed up the dramatic promise 
of his youth, as displayed in the nobly vivid and 
pathetic little tragedy of "Sir Peter Harpdon's 
End," should in our day have handled the story 
of Danae and the story of Bellerophon so effec- 
tively as to make it impossible for the elder poet 
either to escape or to sustain comparison with 
the author of "The Earthly Paradise"; but the 
most appreciative admirers of Morris will not 
be the slowest or the least ready to do justice to 
the admirable qualities displayed in Heywood 's 
dramatic treatment of these legends. The nat- 
urally sweet and spontaneous delicacy of the 
later poet must not be looked for in the homely 
and audacious realism of Heywood; in whose 
work the style of the Knight's Tale and the st^de 
of the Miller's Tale run side by side and hand 
in hand. 

From the Golden Age to the Iron Age the 



2i6 THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

growth and ascent of Heywood's dramatic power 
may fairly be said to correspond in a reversed 
order with the degeneracy and decline of human 
heroism and happiness in the legendary gradation 
or degradation of the classical four ages. "The 
Golden Age" is a delightful example of dramatic 
poetry in its simplest and most primary stage; 
in "The Silver Age" the process of evolution is 
already visible at work. Bellerophon and Aurea 
cannot certainly be compared with the Joseph 
and Phraxanor of Charles Wells : but the curt and 
abrupt scene in which they are hastily thrust on 
the stage and as hastily swept off it is excellently 
composed and written. The highest possible 
tribute to the simple and splendid genius of 
Plautus is paid by the evidence of the fact that 
all his imitators have been obliged to follow so 
closely on the lines of his supernatural, poetical, 
and farcical comedy of Amphitryon. Hey wood, 
Rotrou, Moliere, and Dryden have sat at his feet 
and copied from his dictation like school-boys. 
The French pupils, it must be admitted, have 
profited better and shown themselves apter and 
happier disciples than the English. I cannot 
think that even Moliere has improved on the text 
of Rotrou as much, or nearly as much, as he has 
placed himself under unacknowledged obligation 
to his elder countryman: but in Dryden's version 



THOMAS HEY WOOD 217 

there is a taint of greasy vulgarity, a reek of 
obtrusive ruffianism, from which Heywood's ver- 
sion is as clean as Shakespeare's could have been, 
had he bestowed on the "Amphitruo" the honor 
he conferred on the "Menaschmi." The power 
of condensation into a few compact scenes of 
material sufficient for five full acts is a remark- 
able and admirable gift of Heywood's. 

After the really dramatic episode in which he 
had the advantage of guidance by the laughing 
light of a greater comic genius than his own, 
Heywood contentedly resumes the simple task 
of arranging for the stage a mythological chron- 
icle of miscellaneous adventure. The jealousy of 
Juno is naturally the mainspring of the action 
and the motive which affords some show of con- 
nection or coherence to the three remaining acts 
of "The Silver Age": the rape of Proserpine, the 
mourning and wandering and wrath of Ceres, are 
treated with so sweet and beautiful a simplicity of 
touch that Milton may not impossibly have em- 
balmed and transfigured some reminiscence of 
these scenes in a passage of such heavenly beauty 
as custom cannot stale. Another episode, and 
one not even indirectly connected with the labors 
of Hercules, is the story of Semele, handled with 
the same simple and straightforward skill of 

dramatic exposition, the same purity and fluency 
15 



2i8 THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

of blameless and spontaneous verse, that dis- 
tinguish all parts alike of this dramatic chronicle. 
The second of the five plays composing it closes 
with the rescue of Proserpine by Hercules, and 
the judgment of Jupiter on "the Arraignment of 
the Moon." 

In "The Brazen Age" there is somewhat more 
of dramatic unity or coherence than in the two 
bright easy-going desultory plays which preceded 
it: it closes at least with a more effective ca- 
tastrophe than either of them in the death of 
Hercules. However far inferior to the haughty 
and daring protest or appeal in which Sophocles, 
speaking through the lips of the virtuous Hyllus, 
impeaches and denounces the iniquity of heaven 
with a steadfast and earnest vehemence unsur- 
passed in its outspoken rebellion by any modem 
questioner or blasphemer of divine providence, 
the simple and humble sincerity of the English 
playwright has given a not unimpressive or in- 
harmonious conclusion to the same superhuman 
tragedy. In the previous presentation of the 
story of Meleager, Heywood has improved upon 
the brilliant and passionate rhetoric of Ovid by 
the introduction of an original and happy touch 
of dramatic effect: his Althaea, after firing the 
brand with which her son's life is destined to bum 
out, relents and plucks it back for a minute from 



THOMAS HEYWOOD 



219 



the flame, giving the victim a momentary respite 
from torture, a fugitive recrudescence of strength 
and spirit, before she rekindles it. The pathos of 
his farewell has not been overpraised by Lamb: 
who might have added a word in recognition of 
the very spirited and effective suicide of Althaea, 
not unworthily heralded or announced in such 
verses as these: 

This was my son, 
Bom with sick throes, nursed from my tender breast, 
Brought up with feminine care, cherished with love; 
His youth my pride; his honor all my wishes; 
So dear, that little less he was than life. 

The subsequent adventures of Hercules and 
the Argonauts are presented with the same quiet 
straightforwardness of treatment: it is curious 
that the tragic end of Jason and Medea should 
find no place in the multifarious chronicle which 
is nominally and mainly devoted to the record of 
the life and death of Hercules, but into which the 
serio-comic episode of Mars and Venus and 
Vulcan is thrust as crudely and abruptly as it is 
humorously and dramatically presented. The 
rivalry of Omphale and Deianeira for their 
hero's erratic affection affords a lively and 
happy mainspring — not suggested by Caxton — 
for the tragic action and passion of the closing 



220 THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

At the opening of "The Iron Age," nineteen 
years later in date of pubhcation, we find our- 
selves at last arrived in a province of dramatic 
poetry where something of consecutive and co- 
herent action is apparently the aim if not always 
the achievement of the writer. These ten acts do 
really constitute something like a play, and a play 
of serious, various, progressive, and sustained 
interest, beginning with the elopement and clos- 
ing with the suicide of Helen. There is little in 
it to suggest the influence of either Homer or 
Shakespeare: whose "Troilus and Cressida" had 
appeared in print, for the helplessly bewildered 
admiration of an eternally mystified world, just 
twenty- three years before. The only figure 
equally prominent in either play is that of 
Thersites : but Heywood, happily and wisely, has 
made no manner of attempt to rival or to re- 
produce the frightful figure of the intelligent 
Yahoo in which the sane and benignant genius of 
Shakespeare has for once anticipated and eclipsed 
the mad and malignant genius of Swift. It 
should be needless to add that his Ulysses has as 
little of Shakespeare's as of Homer's: and that 
the brutalization or degradation of the god-like 
figures of Ajax and Achilles is only less offensive 
in the lesser than in the greater poet's work. 
In the friendly duel between Hector and Ajax 



THOMAS HEY WOOD 221 

the very text of Shakespeare is followed with 
exceptional and almost servile fidelity: but the 
subsequent exchange of gifts is, of course, intro- 
duced in imitation of earlier and classic models. 
The contest of Ajax and Ulysses is neatly and 
spiritedly cast into dramatic form: Ovid, of 
course, remains unequalled, as he who runs may 
read in Dryden's grand translation, but Heywood 
has done better — to my mind at least — than 
Shirley was to do in the next generation ; though 
it is to be noted that Shirley has retained more of 
the magnificent original than did his immediate 
precursor: but the death of Ajax is too pitiful a 
burlesque to pass muster even as a blasphemous 
travestie of the sacred text of Sophocles. In the 
fifth play of this pentalogy Heywood has to cope 
with no such matchless models or precursors; 
and it is perhaps the brightest and most interest- 
ing of the five. Sinon is a spirited and rather 
amusing understudy of Thersites: his seduction 
of Cressida is a grotesquely diverting variation 
on the earlier legend relating to the final fall of 
the typical traitress ; and though time and space 
are wanting for the development or indeed the 
presentation of any more tragic or heroic char- 
acter, the rapid action of the last two acts is 
workmanlike in its simple fashion: the compli- 
cated or rather accumulated chronicle of crime 



222 THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

and retribution may claim at least the credit due 
to straightforward lucidity of composition and 
sprightly humility of style. 

In "Love's Mistress; or, The Queen's Masque," 
the stage chronicler or historian of the Four Ages 
appears as something more of a dramatic poet: 
his work has more of form and maturity, with no 
whit less of spontaneity and spirit, simplicity and 
vivacity. The framework or setting of these five 
acts, in which Midas and Apuleius play the lead- 
ing parts, is sustained with lively and homely 
humor from induction to epilogue: the story of 
Psyche is thrown into dramatic form with happier 
skill and more graceful simplicity by Heywood 
than afterward by Moliere and Comeille ; though 
there is here nothing comparable with the famous 
and exquisite love scene in which the genius of 
Comeille renewed its youth and replumed its 
wing with feathers borrowed from the heedless 
and hapless Theophile's. The fortunes of Psyche 
in English poetry have been as curious and vari- 
ous as her adventures on earth and elsewhere. 
Besides and since this pretty little play of Hey- 
wood's, she has inspired a long narrative poem by 
Marmion, one of the most brilliant and inde- 
pendent of the younger comic writers who sat at 
the feet or gathered round the shrine of Ben 
Jonson; a lyrical drama by William the Dutch- 



THOMAS HEYWOOD 223 

man's poet laureate, than which nothing more 
portentous in platitude ever crawled into print, 
and of which the fearfully and wonderfully wood- 
en verse evoked from Shad well's great predeces- 
sor in the office of court rhymester an immor- 
talizing reference to ' ' Prince Nicander's vein ' ' ; 
a magnificent ode by Keats, and a very pretty 
example of metrical romance by Morris, 

' ' Inexplicable and eccentric as were the moods 
and fashions of dramatic poetry in an age when 
Shakespeare could think fit to produce anything 
so singular in its composition and so mysterious 
in its motive as 'Troilus and Cressida,' the most 
eccentric and inexplicable play of its time, or 
perhaps of any time, is probably 'The Rape of 
Lucrece.'" This may naturally be the verdict 
of a hasty reader at a first glance over the party- 
colored scenes of a really noble tragedy, crossed 
and checkered with the broadest and quaintest 
interludes of lyric and erotic farce. But, setting 
these eccentricities duly or indulgently aside, we 
must recognize a fine specimen of chivalrous and 
romantic rather than classical or mythological 
drama; one, if not belonging properly or essen- 
tially to the third rather than to the second of the 
four sections into which Heywood's existing plays 
may be exhaustively divided, which stands on 
the verge between them wath something of the 



224" THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

quaintest and most graceful attributes of either. 
The fine instinct and the simple skill with which 
the poet has tempered the villany of his villains 
without toning down their atrocities by the alloy 
of any incongruous quality must be acknowledged 
as worthily characteristic of a writer who at his 
ethical best might be defined as something of a 
plebeian Sidney. There are touches of criminal 
heroism and redeeming humanity even in the 
parts of Sextus and Tullia: the fearless despera- 
tion of the doomed ravisher, the conjugal devo- 
tion of the hunted parricide, give to the last de- 
fiant agony of the abominable mother and son a 
momentary tone of almost chivalrous dignity. 
The blank verse is excellent, though still con- 
siderably alloyed with rhyme: a fusion or alter- 
nation of metrical efifects in which the young 
Hey wood was no less skilful and successful, in- 
artistic as the skill and illegitimate as the success 
may seem to modem criticism, than the young 
Shakespeare. 

The eleven plays already considered make 
up the two divisions of He3rwood's work which 
with all their great and real merit have least 
in them of those peculiar qualities most distinc- 
tive and representative of his genius : those quali- 
ties of which when we think of him we think first, 
and which on summing up his character as a poet 



THOMAS HEYWOOD 225 

we most naturally associate with his name. As 
a historical or mythological playwright, working 
on material derived from classic legends or from 
English annals, he shows signs now and then, as 
occasion offers, of the sweet-tempered manliness, 
the noble kindliness, which won the heart of 
Lamb: something too there is in these plays of 
his pathos, and something of his humor: but if 
this were all we had of him we should know com- 
paratively little of what we now most prize in 
him. Of this we find most in the plays dealing 
with English life in his own day: but there is 
more of it in his romantic tragicomedies than in 
his chronicle histories or his legendary complica- 
tions and variations on the antique. The famous 
and delicious burlesque of Beaumont and Fletcher 
cannot often be forgotten but need not always be 
remembered in reading "The Four Prentices of 
London." Externally the most extravagant and 
grotesque of dramatic poems, this eccentric tragi- 
comedy of chivalrous adventure is full of poetic as 
well as fantastic interest. There is really some- 
thing of discrimination in the roughly and readily 
sketched characters of the four crusading broth- 
ers : the youngest especially is a life-like model of 
restless and reckless gallantry as it appears when 
incarnate in a hot-headed English boy; unlike 
even in its likeness to the same type as embodied 



226 THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

in a French youngster such as the immortal 
d'Artagnan. Justice has been done by Lamb, and 
consequently as well as subsequently by later 
criticism, to the occasionally fine poetry which 
breaks out by flashes in this quixotic romance of 
the City, with its serio-comic ideal of crusading 
counter-jumpers: but it has never to my knowl- 
edge been observed that in the scene ' ' where they 
toss their pikes so," which aroused the special 
enthusiasm of the worthy fellow-citizen whose 
own prentice was to bear the knightly ensign of 
the Burning Pestle, Heywood, the future object 
of Dryden's ignorant and pointless insult, an- 
ticipated with absolute exactitude the style of 
Dryden's own tragic blusterers when most busily 
bandying tennis-balls of ranting rhyme in mutual 
challenge and reciprocal retort of amoebaean 
epigram.^ 

It is a pity that Heywood's civic or professional 

' Compare this with any similar sample of heroic dialogue 
in " Tyrannic Love " or " The Conquest of Granada ": 

"Rapier and pike, is that thy honored play? 

Look down, ye gods, this combat to survey." 
"Rapier and pike this combat shall decide: 

Gods, angels, men, shall see me tame thy pride." 
"I'll teach thee: thou shalt like my zany be, 

And feign to do my cunning after me." 

This will remind the reader not so much of the " Re- 
hearsal " as of Butler's infinitely superior parody in the 
heroic dialogue of Cat and Puss. 



THOMAS HEYWOOD 227 

devotion to the service of the metropolis should 
ever have been worse employed than in the trans- 
figuration of the idealized prentice : it is a greater 
pity that we cannot exchange all Heywood's ex- 
tant masques for any one of the two hundred plays 
or so now missing in which, as he tells us, he "had 
either an entire hand, or at least a main finger." 
The literary department of a Lord Mayor's show 
can hardly be considered as belonging to litera- 
ture, even when a poet's time and trouble were 
misemployed in compiling the descriptive prose 
and the declamatory verse contributed to the 
ceremony. Not indeed that it was a poet who 
devoted so much toil and good-will to celebration 
or elucidation of the laborious projects and ob- 
jects both by water and land which then dis- 
tinguished or deformed the sundry triumphs, 
pageants, and shows on which Messrs. Christmas 
Brothers and their most ingenious parent were 
employed in a more honorable capacity than the 
subordinate function of versifier or showman — 
an office combining the parts and the duties of the 
immortal Mrs. Jarley and her laureate Mr. Shum. 
Lexicographers might pick out of the text some 
rare if not unique Latinisms or barbarisms such 
as ' * prestigion ' ' and ' ' strage ' ' : but except for 
the purpose of such "harmless drudges" and 
perhaps of an occasional hunter after samples of 



228 THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

the bathetic which might have rewarded the 
attention of Arbuthnot or Pope, the text of these 
pageants must be as barren and even to them it 
would presumably be as tedious a subject of study 
as the lucubrations of the very dullest English 
moralist or American humorist ; a course of read- 
ing digestible only by such constitutions as could 
survive and assimilate a diet of Martin Tupper 
or Mark Twain. And yet even in the very 
homeliest doggrel of Heywood's or Shakespeare's 
time there is something comparatively not con- 
temptible; the English, when not alloyed by 
fantastic or pedantic experiment, has a simple 
historic purity and dignity of its own; the dul- 
ness is not so dreary as the dulness of mediaeval 
prosers, the commonplace is not so vulgar as the 
commonplace of more modem scribes. 

"The Trial of Chivalry" is a less extravagant 
example of homely romantic drama than "The 
Four Prentices of London." We owe to Mr. 
Bullen the rediscovery of this play, and to Mr. 
Fleay the determination and verification of its 
authorship. In style and in spirit it is perfect 
Hey wood : simple and noble in emotion and con- 
ception, primitive and straightforward in con- 
struction and expression; inartistic but not in- 
effectual; humble and facile, but not futile or 
prosaic. It is a rather more rational and natural 



THOMAS HEYWOOD 229 

piece of work than might have been expected 
from its author when equipped after the heroic 
fashion of Mallory or Froissart: its date is more 
or less indistinctly indicated by occasional rhymes 
and peculiar conventionalities of diction: and if 
Heywood in the panoply of a knight-errant may 
now and then suggest to his reader the figure of 
Sancho Panza in his master's armor, his pedes- 
trian romance is so genuine, his modest ambition 
so high-spirited and high-minded, that it would 
be juster and more critical to compare him with 
Don Quixote masquerading in the accoutrements 
of his esquire. Dick Bowyer, whose life and 
death are mendaciously announced on the catch- 
penny title-page, and who (like Tiny Tim in 
"A Christmas Carol ") "does not die," is a rather 
rough, thin, and faint sketch of the bluff British 
soldier of fortune who appears and reappears to 
better advantage in other plays of Heywood 
and his fellows. That this must be classed 
among the earlier if not the earliest of his works 
we may infer from the primitive simplicity of a 
stage direction which recalls another in a play 
printed five years before. In the second scene of 
the third act of "The Trial of Chivalry" we read 
as follows: "Enter Forester, missing the other 
taken away, speaks anything, and exit." In the 
penultimate scene of the second part of "King 



230 THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

Edward IV." we find this even quainter direction, 
which has been quoted before now as an instance 
of the stage conditions or habits of the time: 
"Jockie is led to whipping over the stage, speak- 
ing some words, but of no importance." 

A further and deeper debt of thanks is due to 
Mr. Bullen for the recovery of "The Captives; or, 
The Lost Recovered," after the lapse of nearly 
three centuries. The singularly prophetic sub- 
title of this classic and romantic tragicomedy has 
been justified at so late a date by the beneficence 
of chance, in favorable conjunction with the 
happy devotion and fortunate research of a 
thorough and a thoroughly able student, as to 
awaken in all fellow-lovers of dramatic poetry a 
sense of hopeful wonder with regard to the almost 
illimitable possibilities of yet further and yet 
greater treasure to be discovered and recovered 
from the keeping of "dust and damned oblivion." 
Meantime we may be heartily thankful for the 
recovery of an excellent piece of work, written 
throughout with the easy mastery of serious or 
humorous verse, the graceful pliancy of style and 
the skilful simplicity of composition, which might 
have been expected from a mature work of Hey- 
wood's, though the execution of it would now and 
then have suggested an earlier date. The clown, 
it may be noticed, is the same who always reap- 



THOMAS HEYWOOD 231 

pears to do the necessary comicalities in Hey- 
wood's plays; if hardly "a fellow of infinite jest," 
yet an amusing one in his homely way; though 
one would have thought that on the homeliest 
London stage of 1624 the taste for antiphonal 
improvisation of doggrel must have passed into 
the limbo of obsolete simplicities. The main plot 
is very well managed, as with Plautus once more 
for a model might properly have been expected ; 
the rather ferociously farcical underplot must 
surely have been borrowed from some fabliau. 
The story has been done into doggrel by George 
Colman the younger: but that cleanly and pure 
minded censor of the press would hardly have 
licensed for the stage a play which would have 
required, if the stage-carpenter had been then in 
existence, the production of a scene which would 
have anticipated what Gautier so plausibly 
plumed himself upon as a novelty in stage effect 
— imagined for the closing scene of his imaginary 
tragedy of "Heliogabalus." 

There are touches of pathetic interest and 
romantic invention in ' 'A Maidenhead Well Lost ' ' : 
two or three of the leading characters are prettily 
sketched if not carefully finished, and the style is 
a graceful compromise between unambitious po- 
etry and mildly spirited prose : but it is hardly 
to be classed among Hey wood's best work of the 



232 THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

kind: it has no scenes of such fervid and noble 
interest, such vivid and keen emotion as dis- 
tinguish "A Challenge for Beauty": and for all 
its simple grace of writing and ingenuous in- 
genuity of plot it may not improbably be best 
remembered by the average modem reader as 
remarkable for the most amusing and astonish- 
ing example on record of anything but "inex- 
plicable ' ' dumb show — to be paralleled only and 
hardly by a similar interlude of no less elaborate 
arrangement and significant eccentricity in the 
sole dramatic venture of Henri de Latouche — 
"La Reine d'Espagne." 

Little favor has been shown by modem critics 
and even by modem editors to "The Royal King 
and the Loyal Subject" : and the author himself, 
in committing it to the tardy test of publication, 
offered a quaint and frank apology for its old- 
fashioned if not obsolete style of composition and 
versification. Yet I cannot but think that Hallam 
was right and Dyce was wrong in his estimate of 
a play which does not challenge and need not 
shrink from comparison with Fletcher's more elab- 
orate, rhetorical, elegant, and pretentious tragi- 
comedy of "The Loyal Subject"; that the some- 
what eccentric devotion of Heywood's hero is not 
more slavish or foolish than the obsequious sub- 
mission of Fletcher's; and that even if we may 



THOMAS HEYWOOD 



233 



not be allowed to make allowance for the primi- 
tive straightforwardness or take delight in the 
masculine simplicity of the elder poet, we must 
claim leave to object that there is more essential 
sery/ility of spirit, more preposterous prostration 
of manhood, in the Russian ideal of Fletcher than 
in the English ideal of Hey wood. The humor is 
as simple as is the appeal to emotion or sym- 
pathetic interest in this primitive tragicomedy; 
but the comic satire on worldly venality and 
versatility is as genuine and honest as the se- 
rious exposition of character is straightforward 
and sincere. 

The best of Hey wood's romantic plays is the 
most graceful and beautiful, in detached scenes 
and passages, of all his extant works. The com- 
bination of the two plots — they can hardly be 
described as plot and underplot — is so dexter- 
ously happy that it would do the highest credit 
to a more famous and ambitious artist : the rival 
heroes are so really noble and attractive that we 
are agreeably compelled to condone whatever 
seems extravagant or preposterous in their re- 
lations or their conduct: there is a breath of 
quixotism in the air which justifies and ennobles 
it. The heroines are sketched with natural grace 
and spirit: it is the more to be regretted that 

their bearing in the last act should have less of 
16 



234 THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

delicacy or modesty than of ingenious audacity 
in contrivances for striking and daring stage 
effect; a fault as grave in aesthetics as in ethics, 
and one rather to have been expected from 
Fletcher than from Heywood. But the general 
grace and the occasional pathos of the writing 
may fairly be set against the gravest fault that 
can justly be found with so characteristic and so 
charming a work of Heywood's genius at its 
happiest and brightest as "A Challenge for 
Beauty." 

The line of demarcation between realism and 
romance is sometimes as difficult to determine in 
the work of Heywood as in the character of his 
time : the genius of England, the spirit of English- 
men, in the age of Shakespeare, had so much of 
the practical in its romance and so much of the 
romantic in its practice that the beautiful dra- 
matic poem in which the English heroes Man- 
hurst and Montferrers play their parts so nobly 
beside their noble Spanish compeers in chivalry 
ought perhaps to have been classed rather among 
the studies of contemporary life on which their 
author's fame must principally and finally de- 
pend than among those which have been defined 
as belonging to the romantic division of his work. 
There is much the same fusion of interests, as 
there is much the same mixture of styles, in the 



THOMAS HEYWOOD 235 

conduct of a play for which we have once more 
to tender our thanks to the living benefactor at 
once of Hey wood and of his admirers. That 
Mr. Bullen was well advised in putting forward 
a claim for Heywood as the recognizable author 
of a play which a few years ago had never seen 
the light is as evident as that his estimate of the 
fine English quality which induced this recogni- 
tion was justified by all rules of moral evidence. 
There can be less than little doubt that "Dick 
of Devonshire" is one of the two hundred and 
twenty in which Heywood had "a main finger" 
— though not, I should say, by any means "an 
entire hand." The metre is not always up to 
his homely but decent mark: though in many of 
the scenes it is worthy of his best plays for 
smoothness, fluency, and happy simplicity of 
effect. Dick Pike is a better study of the bluff 
and tough English hero than Dick Bowyer in 
' ' The Trial of Chivalry ' ' : and the same chivalrous 
sympathy with the chivalrous spirit and tradition 
of a foreign and a hostile nation which delights 
us in "A Challenge for Beauty" pervades and 
vivifies this long-lost and long-forgotten play. 
The partial sacrifice of ethical propriety or moral 
consistency to the actual or conventional exi- 
gences of the stage is rather more startling than 
usual; a fratricidal ravisher and slanderer could 



236 THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

hardly have expected even from theatrical tol- 
erance the monstrous lenity of pardon and dis- 
missal with a prospect of being happy though 
married. The hand of Hey wood is more rec- 
ognizable in the presentation of a clown who 
may fairly be called identical with all his others, 
and in the noble answer of the criminal's brother 
to their father's very natural question: "Why 
dost thou take his part so?" 

Because no drop of honor falls from him 
But I bleed with it. 

This high-souled simplicity of instinct is as 
traceable in the earlier as in the later of Hey- 
wood's extant works: he is English of the Eng- 
lish in his quiet, frank, spontaneous expression, 
when suppression is no longer either possible or 
proper, of all noble and gentle and natural emo- 
tion. His passion and his pathos, his loyalty and 
his chivalry, are always so unobtrusive that their 
modesty may sometimes run the risk of eclipse 
before the glory of more splendid poets and more 
conspicuous patriots : but they are true and trust- 
worthy as Shakespeare's or Milton's or Words- 
worth's or Tennyson's or Browning's. 

It was many a year before Dick Pike had 
earned the honor of commemoration by his hand 
or by any other poet's that Heywood had won his 



THOMAS HEYWOOD 237 

spurs as the champion presenter — if I may be 
allowed to revive the word — of his humbler and 
homelier countrymen under the light of a no less 
noble than simple realism. "The Fair Maid of 
the Exchange" is a notable example of what I 
believe is professionally or theatrically called a 
one-part piece. Adapting Dr. Johnson's curiously 
unjust and inept remark on Shakespeare's "King 
Henry VIII." — the play in which, according to 
the principles or tenets of the new criticism which 
walks or staggers by the new light of a new 
scholarship, "the new Shakspere" may or must 
have been assisted by Flitcher (why not also by 
Meddletun, Messenger, and a few other novi hom- 
ines?), we may say, and it may be said this time 
with some show of reason, that the genius of the 
author limps in and limps out with the Cripple. 
Most of the other characters and various episod- 
ical incidents of the incomposite story are alike, 
if I may revive a good and expressive phrase of 
the period, hastily and unskilfully slubbered up: 
Bowdler is a poor second-hand and third-rate ex- 
ample of the Jonsonian gull; and the transfer 
of Moll's regard from him to his friend is both 
childishly conceived and childishly contrived. On 
the whole, a second-rate play, with one or two 
first-rate scenes and passages to which Lamb has 
done perhaps no more than justice by the charac- 



238 THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

teristic and eloquent cordiality of his commenda- 
tions. Its date may be probably determined as 
early among the earliest of its author's by the 
occurrence in mid-dialogue of a sestet in the 
popular metre of "Venus and Adonis," with 
archaic inequality in the lengths of the second 
and fourth rhyming words: a notable note of 
metrical or immetrical antiquity in style. The 
self-willed if high-minded Phyllis Flower has 
something in her of Heywood's later heroines, 
Bess Bridges of Plymouth and Luce the gold- 
smith's daughter, but is hardly as interesting or 
attractive as either. 

Much less than this can be said for the heroines, 
if heroines they can in any sense be called, of 
the two plays by which Heywood is best known 
as a tragic and a comic painter of contemporary 
life among his countrymen. It is certainly not 
owing to any exceptional power of painting or 
happiness in handling feminine character that 
the first place among his surviving works has 
been generally and rationally assigned to "A 
Woman Killed with Kindness." The fame of 
this famous realistic tragedy is due to the perfect 
fitness of the main subject for treatment in the 
manner of which Heywood was in his day and 
remains to the present day beyond all com- 
parison the greatest and the most admirable 



THOMAS HEYWOOD 239 

master. It is not that the interest is either nat- 
urally greater, or greater by force and felicity of 
genius in the dramatist, than that of other and 
far inferior plays. It is not that the action is 
more artistically managed : it is not that curiosity 
or sympathy is aroused or sustained with any 
particular skill . Such a play as " Fatal Curiosity ' ' 
is as truthfully lifelike and more tragically ex- 
citing: it is in mere moral power and charm, with 
just a touch of truer and purer poetry pervading 
and coloring and flavoring and quickening the 
whole, that the work of a Heywood approves 
itself as beyond the reach or the ambition of a 
Lillo. One figure among many remains im- 
pressed on his reader's memory once for all: the 
play is full of incident, perhaps over-full of actors, 
excellently well written and passably well com- 
posed; but it lives, it survives and overtops its 
fellows, by grace of the character of its hero. The 
underplot, whether aesthetically or historically 
considered, is not more singular and sensational 
than extravagant and unpleasant to natural taste 
as well as to social instinct: the other agents in 
the main plot are little more than sketches — 
sometimes deplorably out of drawing: Anne is 
never really alive till on her death-bed, and her 
paramour is never alive — in his temptation, his 
transgression, or his impenitence — at all. The 



240 THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

whole play, as far as we remember or care to re- 
member it, is Frankford : he suffices to make it a 
noble poem and a memorable play. 

The hero of "The English Traveller," however 
worthy to stand beside him as a typical sample of 
English manhood at its noblest and gentlest, can- 
not be said to occupy so predominant a place in 
the conduct of the action or the memor^^ of the 
reader. The comic Plautine underplot — Plautus 
always brought good luck to Heywood — is so 
incomparably preferable to the ugly and un- 
natural though striking and original underplot of 
' ' A Woman Killed with Kindness ' ' as wellnigh to 
counterbalance the comparative lack of interest, 
plausibility, and propriety in the main action. 
The seduction of Mrs. Frankford is so roughly 
slurred over that it is hard to see how, if she could 
not resist a first whisper of temptation, she can 
ever have been the loyal wife and mother whose 
fall we are expected to deplore : but the seduction 
of Mrs. Wincott, or rather her transformation 
from the likeness of a loyal and high-minded lady 
to the likeness of an impudent and hypocritical 
harlot, is neither explained nor explicable in the 
case of a woman who dies of a sudden shock of 
shame and penitence. Her paramour is only not 
quite so shapeless and shadowy a scoundrel as 
the betrayer of Frankford: but Heywood is no 



THOMAS HEYWOOD 241 

great hand at a villain: his nobly simple concep- 
tion and grasp and development of character will 
here be recognized only in the quiet and perfect 
portraiture of the two grand old gentlemen and 
the gallant unselfish youth whom no more subtle 
or elaborate draughtsman could have set before 
us in clearer or fuller outline, with more attrac- 
tive and actual charm of feature and expression. 
"The Fair Maid of the West" is one of Hey- 
wood's most characteristic works, and one of his 
most delightful plays. Inartistic as this sort 
of dramatic poem may seem to the lovers of 
theatrical composition and sensational arrange- 
ment, of emotional calculations and premeditated 
shocks, it has a place of its own, and a place of 
honor, among the incomparably various forms of 
noble and serious drama which English poets of 
the Shakespearean age conceived, created, and 
left as models impossible to reproduce or to rival 
in any generation of poets or readers, actors or 
spectators, after the decadent forces of English 
genius in its own most natural and representative 
form of popular and creative activity had finally 
shrivelled up and shuddered into everlasting in- 
anition under the withering blast of Puritanism. 
Before that blight had fallen upon the country of 
Shakespeare, the variety and fertility of dramatic 
form and dramatic energy which distinguished 



242 THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

the typical imagination or invention of his coun- 
trymen can only be appreciated or conceived by 
students of what yet is left us of the treasure be- 
queathed by the fellows and the followers of 
Shakespeare. Every other man who could speak 
or write at all was a lyric poet, a singer of beauti- 
ful songs, in the generation before Shakespeare's: 
every other such man in Shakespeare's was a 
dramatic poet above or beyond all comparison 
with any later claimant of the title among 
Shakespeare's countrymen. One peculiarly and 
characteristically English type of drama which 
then jflourished here and there among more am- 
bitious if not more interesting fomis or varieties, 
and faded forever with the close of the age of 
Shakespeare, was the curious and delightful kind 
of play dealing with records or fictions of con- 
temporary adventure. The veriest failures in 
this line have surely something of national and 
historical interest; telling us as they do of the 
achievements or in any case of the aspirations 
and the ideals, the familiar traditions and ambi- 
tions and admirations, of our simplest and noblest 
forefathers. Even such a play as that in which 
the adventures of the Shirleys were hurried and 
huddled into inadequate and incoherent presenta- 
tion as "The Travels of Three English Brothers," 
however justly it may offend or dissatisfy the 



THOMAS HEYWOOD 



243 



literary critic, can hardly be without attraction 
for the lover of his country: curiosity may be 
disappointed of its hope, yet patriotism may find 
matter for its sympathy. And if so much may be 
said on behalf of a poetic and dramatic failure, 
this and far more than this may be claimed on 
behalf of such plays as "The Fair Maid of the 
West" and "Fortune by Land and Sea." Of 
these the first is certainly the better play : I should 
myself be inclined to rank it among Heywood's 
very best. He never wrote anything brighter, 
sprightlier, livelier or fuller of life and energy: 
more amusing in episodical incident or by-play, 
more interesting and attractive in the structure 
or the progress of the main story. No modern 
heroine with so strong a dash of the Amazon — so 
decided a cross of the male in her — was ever so 
noble, credible and lovable as Bess Bridges: and 
Plymouth ought really to do itself the honor of 
erecting a memorial to her poet. An amusing 
instance of Heywood's incomparable good-nature 
and sweetness of temper in dealing with the 
creatures of his genius — incomparable I call it, 
because in Shakespeare the same beautiful quality 
is more duly tempered and toned down to more 
rational compliance with the demands of reason 
and probability, whether natural or dramatic — is 
here to be recognized in the redemption of a 



244 THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

cowardly bully, and his conversion from a lying 
ruffian into a loyal and worthy sort of fellow. 
The same gallant spirit of sympathy with all 
noble homeliness of character, whether displayed 
in joyful search of adventure or in manful en- 
durance of suffering and wrong, informs the less 
excellently harmonious and well-built play which 
bears the truly and happily English title of 
"Fortune by Land and Sea." It has less ro- 
mantic interest than the later adventures of the 
valiant Bess and her Spencer with the amorous 
King of Fez and his equally erratic consort ; not 
to mention the no less susceptible Italians 
among whom their lot is subsequently cast: but 
it is a model of natural and noble simplicity, of 
homely and lively variety. There is perhaps 
more of the roughness and crudity of style and 
treatment which might be expected from Rowley 
than of the humaner and easier touch of Hey- 
wood in the conduct of the action: the curious 
vehemence and primitive brutality of social or 
domestic tyranny may recall the use of the same 
dramatic motives by George Wilkins in "The 
Miseries of Enforced Marriage"; but the mixt- 
ure or fusion of tender and sustained emotion 
with the national passion for enterprise and ad- 
venture is pleasantly and peculiarly character- 
istic of Hey wood. 



THOMAS HEYWOOD 245 

In "The Wise Woman of Hogsdon" the dra- 
matic ability of Heywood, as distinct from his 
more poetic and pathetic faculty, shows itself at 
its best and brightest. There are not many much 
better examples of the sort of play usually de- 
fined as a comedy of intrigue, but more properly 
definable as a comedy of action. The special risk 
to which a purveyor of this kind of ware must 
naturally be exposed is the tempting danger of 
sacrificing propriety and consistency of character 
to effective and impressive suggestions or de- 
velopments of situation or event; the inclination 
to think more of what is to happen than of the 
persons it must happen to — the characters to be 
actively or passively affected by the concurrence 
or the evolution of circumstances. Only to the 
very greatest of narrative or dramatic artists in 
creation and composition can this perilous possi- 
bility be all but utterly unknown. Poets of the 
city no less than poets of the court, the homely 
Heywood as well as the fashionable Fletcher, 
tripped and fell now and then over this awkward 
stone of stumbling — a very rock of offence to 
readers of a more exacting temper or a more 
fastidious generation than the respective au- 
diences of patrician and plebeian London in the 
age of Shakespeare. The leading young man of 
this comedy now under notice is represented as 



246 THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

"a wild-headed gentleman," and revealed as an 
abject ruffian of unredeemed and irredeemable 
rascality. As much and even more may be said 
of the execrable wretch who fills a similar part in 
an admirably written play published thirty-six 
years earlier and verified for the first time as 
Heywood's by the keen research and indefatiga- 
ble intuition of Mr. Pleay. The parallel passages 
cited by him from the broadly farcical underplots 
are more than suggestive, even if they be not 
proof positive, of identity in authorship : but the 
identity in atrocity of the two hideous figures 
who play the two leading parts must reluctantly 
be admitted as more serious evidence. The 
abuse of innocent foreign words or syllables by 
comparison or confusion with indecent native 
ones is a simple and school-boy-like sort of jest 
for which Master Hey wood, if impeached as even 
more deserving of the birch than any boy on his 
stage, might have pleaded the example of the 
captain of the school, and protested that his 
humble audacities, if no less indecorous, were 
funnier and less forced than Master Shake- 
speare's. As for the other member of Webster's 
famous triad, I fear that the most indulgent 
sentence passed on Master Dekker, if sent up for 
punishment on the charge of bad language and 
impudence, could hardly in justice be less than 



THOMAS HEYWOOD 247 

Orbilian or Draconic. But he was apparently if 
not assuredly almost as incapable as Shakespeare 
of presenting the most infamous of murderers as 
an erring but pardonable transgressor, not unfit 
to be received back with open arms by the wife he 
has attempted, after a series of the most hideous 
and dastardly outrages, to despatch by poison. 
The excuse for Heywood is simply that in his 
day as in Chaucer's the orthodox ideal of a mar- 
ried heroine was still none other than Patient 
Grizel: Shakespeare alone had got beyond it. 

The earlier of these two plays, "a pleasant" 
if somewhat sensational ' ' comedy entitled ' How 
to Choose a Good Wife from a Bad,'" is written 
for the most part in Heywood 's most graceful and 
poetical vein of verse, with beautiful simplicity, 
purity, and fluency of natural and musical style. 
In none of his plays is the mixture or rather the 
fusion of realism with romance more simply 
happy and harmonious: the rescue of the injured 
wife by a faithful lover from the tomb in which, 
like Juliet, she has been laid while under the 
soporific influence of a supposed poison could 
hardly have been better or more beautifully 
treated by any but the very greatest among 
Heywood's fellow-poets. There is no merit of 
this kind in the later play : but from the dramatic 
if not even from the ethical point of view it is, on 



2 48 THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

the whole, a riper and more rational sort of work. 
The culmination of accumulating evidence by 
which the rascal hero is ultimately overwhelmed 
and put to shame, driven from lie to lie and 
reduced from retractation to retractation as wit- 
ness after witness starts up against him from 
every successive comer of the witch's dwelling, is 
as masterly in management of stage effect as any 
contrivance of the kind in any later and more 
famous comedy: nor can I remember a more 
spirited and vivid opening to any play than the 
quarrelling scene among the gamblers with which 
this one breaks out at once into life-like action, 
full of present interest and promise of more to 
come. The second scene, in which the fair 
sempstress appears at work in her father's shop, 
recalls and indeed repeats the introduction of the 
heroine in an earlier play: but here again the 
author's touch is firmer and his simplicity more 
masculine than before. This coincidence is at 
least as significant as that between the two 
samples of flogging- block doggrel collated for 
comparison by Mr. Fleay: it is indeed a sugges- 
tive though superfluous confirmation of Hey- 
wood's strangely questioned but surely unques- 
tionable claim to the authorship of "The Fair 
Maid of the Exchange." A curious allusion to a 
more famous play of the author's is the charac- 



THOMAS HEYWOOD 249 

teristic remark of the young ruffian Chartley: 
"Well, I see you choleric hasty men are the 
kindest when all is done. Here's such wetting 
of handkerchers ! he weeps to think of his wife, 
she weeps to see her father cry! Peace, fool, we 
shall else have thee claim kindred of the woman 
killed with kindness." And in the fourth and 
last scene of the fourth act the same scoundrel 
is permitted to talk Shakespeare: "I'll go, al- 
though the devil and mischance look big." 

Poetical justice may cry out against the dra- 
matic lenity which could tolerate or prescribe for 
the sake of a comfortable close to this comedy 
the triumphant escape of a villanous old im- 
postor and baby-farmer from the condign punish- 
ment due to her misdeeds; but the severest of 
criminal judges if not of professional witch-find- 
ers might be satisfied with the justice or injustice 
done upon ' ' the late Lancashire Witches ' ' in the 
bright and vigorous tragicomedy which, as we 
learn from Mr. Fleay, so unwarrantably and un- 
charitably (despite a disclaimer in the epilogue) 
anticipated the verdict of their judges against the 
defenceless victims of terrified prepossession and 
murderous perjury. But at this time of day the 
mere poetical reader or dramatic student need 
not concern himself, while reading a brilliant and 
delightful play, with the soundness or unsound- 



250 THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

ness of its moral and historical foundations. 
There may have been a boy so really and so ut- 
terly possessed by the devil who seems now and 
then to enter into young creatures of human 
form and be-monster them as to amuse himself 
by denouncing helpless and harmless women to 
the most horrible of deaths on the most horrible 
of charges: that hideous passing fact does not 
affect or impair the charming and lasting truth 
of Heywood's unsurpassable study, the very 
model of a gallant and life-like English lad, all 
compact of fearlessness and fun, audacity and 
loyalty, so perfectly realized and rendered in this 
quaint and fascinating play. The admixture of 
what a modem boy would call cheek and chaff 
with the equally steadfast and venturesome res- 
olution of the indomitable young scapegrace is 
so natural as to make the supernatural escapades 
in which it involves him quite plausible for the 
time to a reader of the right sort: even as (to 
compare this small masterpiece with a great one) 
such a reader, while studying the marvellous text 
of Meinhold, is no more sceptical than is their 
chronicler as to the sorceries of Sidonia von Bork. 
And however condemnable or blameworthy the 
authors of "The Witches of Lancashire" may 
appear to a modern reader or a modem magis- 
trate or jurist for their dramatic assumption or 



THOMAS HEYWOOD 251 

presumption in begging the question against the 
unconvicted defendants whom they describe in 
the prologue as "those witches the fat jailor 
brought to town," they can hardly have been 
either wishful or able to influence the course of 
justice toward criminals of whose evident guilt 
they were evidently convinced. Shadwell's later 
play of the same name, though not wanting in 
such rough realistic humor and coarse-grained 
homespun interest as we expect in the comic 
produce of his hard and heavy hand, makes 
happily no attempt to emulate the really noble 
touches of poetry and pathos with which Hey- 
wood has thrown out into relief the more serious 
aspect of the supposed crime of witchcraft in its 
influence or refraction upon the honor and hap- 
piness of innocent persons. Og was naturally 
more in his place and more in his element as the 
second "fat jailor" of Lancashire witches than 
as the second English dramatic poet of Psyche: 
he has come closer than his precursors, closer 
indeed than could have been thought possible, 
to actual presentation of the most bestial and 
abominable details of demonolatry recorded by 
the chroniclers of witchcraft : and in such scenes 
as are rather transcribed than adapted from such 
narratives he has imitated his professed master 
and model, Ben Jonson, by appending to his 



252 THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

text, with the most minute and meticulous care, 
all requisite or more than requisite references to 
his original authorities. The allied poets who 
had preceded him were content to handle the 
matter more easily and lightly, with a quaint 
apology for having nothing of more interest to 
offer than "an argument so thin, persons so 
low," that they could only hope their play might 
"pass pardoned, though not praised." Brome's 
original vein of broad humor and farcical fancy 
is recognizable enough in the presentation of the 
bewitched household where the children rule their 
parents and are ruled by their servants ; a situ- 
ation which may have suggested the still more 
amusing development of the same fantastic mo- 
tive in his admirable comedy of "The Antipodes." 
There is a noticeable reference to "Macbeth" in 
the objurgations lavished by the daughter upon 
the mother under the influence of a revolution- 
ary spell: "Is this a fit habit for a handsome 
young gentlewoman's mother? as I hope to be 
a lady, you look like one o' the Scottish way- 
ward sisters." The still more broadly comic 
interlude of the bewitched rustic bridegroom 
and his loudly reclamatory bride is no less hu- 
morously sustained and carried through. Alto- 
gether, for an avowedly hasty and occasional 
piece of work, this tragicomedy is very cred- 



THOMAS HEYWOOD 253 

itably characteristic of both its associated au- 
thors. 

How small a fraction of Heywood's actual 
work is comprised in these twenty-six plays we 
cannot even conjecturally compute ; we only know 
that they amount to less than an eighth part of 
the plays written wholly or mainly by his inde- 
fatigable hand, and that they are altogether out- 
weighed in volume, though decidedly not in value, 
by the existing mass of his undramatic work. We 
know also, if we have eyes to see, that the very 
hastiest and slightest of them does credit to the 
author, and that the best of them are to be count- 
ed among the genuine and imperishable treasures 
of English literature. Such amazing fecundity 
and such astonishing industry would be memor- 
able even in a far inferior writer; but, though I 
certainly cannot pretend to anything like an ex- 
haustive or even an adequate acquaintance with 
all or any of his folios, I can at least affirm that 
they contain enough delightfully readable matter 
to establish a more than creditable reputation. 
His prose, if never to be called masterly, may 
generally be called good and pure: its occasional 
pedantries and pretentions are rather signs of the 
century than faults of the author ; and he can tell 
a story, especially a short story, as well as if not 
better than many a better-known writer. I fear, 



2 54 THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

however, that it is not the poetical quaHty of 
his undramatic verse which can ever be said to 
make it worth reading : it is, as far as I know, of 
the very homeHest homespun ever turned out 
by the very humblest of workmen. His poetry, 
it would be pretty safe to wager, must be looked 
for exclusively in his plays: but there, if not re- 
markable for depth or height of imagination or of 
passion, it will be found memorable for unsur- 
passed excellence of unpretentious elevation in 
treatment of character. The unity (or, to bor- 
row from Coleridge a barbaric word, the triunity) 
of noble and gentle and simple in the finest qual- 
ity of the English character at its best — of the 
English character as revealed in our Sidneys and 
Nelsons and Collingwoods and Franklins — is al- 
most as apparent in the best scenes of his best 
plays as in the lives of our chosen and best- 
beloved heroes: and this, I venture to believe, 
would have been rightly regarded by Thomas 
Heywood as a more desirable and valuable suc- 
cess than the achievement of a noisier triumph 
or the attainment of a more conspicuous place 
among the poets of his country. 



GEORGE CHAPMAN 

George Chapman, translator of Homer, dram- 
atist, and gnomic poet, was bom in 1559, and 
died in 1634. At fifteen, according to Anthony- 
Wood, "he, being well grounded in school learn- 
ing, was sent to the university" of Oxford; at 
thirty -five he published his first poem: "The 
Shadow of Night. ' ' Between these dates, though 
no fact has been unearthed concerning his career, 
it is not improbable that he may have travelled 
in Germany. At thirty-nine he was reckoned 
"among the best of our tragic writers for the 
stage"; but his only play published at that age 
was a crude and formless attempt at romantic 
comedy, which had been acted three years before 
it passed from the stage to the press ; and his first 
tragedy now extant in print, without name of 
author, did not solicit the suffrage of a reader 
till the poet was forty-eight. At thirty-nine he 
had also published the first instalment of his 
celebrated translation of the "Iliad," in a form 
afterward much remodelled; at sixty-five he 



256 THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

crowned the lofty structure of his labor by the 
issue of an English version of the "Hymns" and 
other minor Homeric poems. The former he 
dedicated to Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, 
the hapless favorite of Elizabeth; the latter to 
Robert Carr, Earl of Somerset, the infamous 
minion of James. Six years earlier he had in- 
scribed to Bacon, then Lord Chancellor, a transla- 
tion of Hesiod's "Works and Days." His only 
other versions of classic poems are from the fifth 
satire of Juvenal and the "Hero and Leander" 
which goes under the name of Musseus, the latter 
dedicated to Inigo Jones. His revised and com- 
pleted version of the ' ' Iliad ' ' had been inscribed 
in a noble and memorable poem of dedication to 
Henry Prince of Wales, after whose death he and 
his "Odyssey" fell under the patronage of Carr. 
Of the manner of his death at seventy-five we 
know nothing more than may be gathered from 
the note appended to a manuscript fragment, 
which intimates that the remainder of the poem, 
a lame and awkward piece of satire on his old 
friend Jonson, had been "lost in his sickness." 
Chapman, his first biographer is careful to let 
us know, "was a person of most reverend aspect, 
religious and temperate, qualities rarely meeting 
in a poet"; he had also certain other merits at 
least as necessary to the exercise of that profes- 



GEORGE CHAPMAN 



257 



sion. He had a singular force and solidity of 
thought, an admirable ardor of ambitious devo- 
tion to the service of poetry, a deep and burning 
sense at once of the duty implied and of the 
dignity inherent in his office; a vigor, opulence, 
and loftiness of phrase, remarkable even in that 
age of spiritual strength, wealth, and exaltation 
of thought and style ; a robust eloquence, touched 
not unfrequently with flashes of fancy, and kin- 
dled at times into heat of imagination. The 
main fault of his style is one more commonly 
found in the prose than in the verse of his time — 
a quaint and florid obscurity, rigid with elaborate 
rhetoric and tortuous with labyrinthine illustra- 
tion ; not dark only to the rapid reader through 
closeness and subtlety of thought, like Donne, 
whose miscalled obscurity is so often "all glori- 
ous within," but thick and slab as a witch's gruel 
with forced and barbarous eccentricities of artic- 
ulation. As his language in the higher forms of 
comedy is always pure and clear, and sometimes 
exquisite in the simplicity of its sincere and nat- 
ural grace, the stiffness and density of his more 
ambitious style may perhaps be attributed to 
some pernicious theory or conceit of the dignity 
proper to a moral and philosophic poet. Never- 
theless, many of the gnomic passages in his 
tragedies and allegoric poems are of singular 



258 THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

weight and beauty; the best of these, indeed, 
would not discredit the fame of the very great- 
est poets for subHmity of equal thought and 
expression: witness the lines chosen by Shelley 
as the motto for a poem, and fit to have been 
chosen as the motto for his life. 

The romantic and sometimes barbaric grandeur 
of Chapman's Homer remains attested by the 
praise of Keats, of Coleridge, and of Lamb; it is 
written at a pitch of strenuous and laborious exal- 
tation, which never flags or breaks down, but 
never flies with the ease and smoothness of an 
eagle native to Homeric air. From his occasional 
poems an expert and careful hand might easily 
gather a noble anthology of excerpts, chiefly 
gnomic or meditative, allegoric or descriptive. 
The most notable examples of his tragic work 
are comprised in the series of plays taken, and 
adapted sometimes with singular license, from 
the records of such part of French history as lies 
between the reign of Francis I. and the reign of 
Henry IV., ranging in date of subject from the 
trial and death of Admiral Chabot to the treason 
and execution of Marshal Biron. The two plays 
bearing as epigraph the name of that famous 
soldier and conspirator are a storehouse of lofty 
thought and splendid verse, with scarcely a flash 
or sparkle of dramatic action. The one play of 



GEORGE CHAPMAN 259 

Chapman's whose popularity on the stage sur- 
vived the Restoration is "Bussy d'Ambois" 
(d'Amboise) — a tragedy not lacking in violence 
of action or emotion, and abounding even more 
in sublime or beautiful interludes than in crabbed 
and bombastic passages. His rarest jewels of 
thought and verse detachable from the context 
lie embedded in the tragedy of "Ccesar and 
Pompey," whence the finest of them were first 
extracted by the unerring and unequalled critical 
genius of Charles Lamb. In most of his tragedies 
the lofty and laboring spirit of Chapman may be 
said rather to shine fitfully through parts than 
steadily to pervade the whole; they show nobly 
altogether as they stand, but even better by help 
of excerpts and selections. But the excellence 
of his best comedies can only be appreciated by 
a student who reads them fairly and fearlessly 
through, and, having made some small deduc- 
tions on the score of occasional pedantry and 
occasional crudity, finds in "All Fools," "Mon- 
sieur d'Olive," "The Gentleman Usher," and 
"The Widow's Tears" a wealth and vigor of 
humorous invention, a tender and earnest grace 
of romantic poetry, which may atone alike for 
these passing blemishes and for the lack of 
such clear-cut perfection of character and such 
dramatic progression of interest as we find 



26o THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

only in the yet higher poets of our heroic 
age. 

The severest critic of his shortcomings or 
his errors, if not incompetent to appreciate his 
achievements and his merits, must recognize in 
Chapman an original poet, one who held of no 
man and acknowledged no master, but through- 
out the whole generation of our greatest men, 
from the birth of Marlowe wellnigh to the death 
of Jonson, held on his own hard and haughty 
way of austere and sublime ambition, not with- 
out an occasional pause for kindly and graceful 
salutation of such younger and still nobler com- 
peers as Jonson and Fletcher. With Shakespeare 
we should never have guessed that he had come 
at all in contact, had not the intelligence of Mr. 
Minto divined or rather discerned him to be 
the rival poet referred to in Shakespeare's son- 
nets with a grave note of passionate satire, 
hitherto as enigmatic as almost all questions con- 
nected with those divine and dangerous poems. 
This conjecture the critic has fortified by such 
apt collocation and confrontation of passages 
that we may now reasonably accept it as an as- 
certained and memorable fact. 

The objections which a just and adequate 
judgment may bring against Chapman's master- 
work, his translation of Homer, may be summed 



GEORGE CHAPMAN 261 

up in three epithets; it is romantic, laborious, 
EHzabethan. The qualities implied by these 
epithets are the reverse of those which should 
distinguish a translator of Homer; but setting 
this apart, and considering the poems as in the 
main original works, the superstructure of a 
romantic poet on the submerged foundations of 
Greek verse, no praise can be too warm or high 
for the power, the freshness, the indefatigable 
strength and inextinguishable fire which animate 
this exalted work, and secure for all time that 
shall take cognizance of English poetry an hon- 
ored place in its highest annals for the memory 
of Chapman. 



CYRIL TOURNEUR 

"They, shut up under their roofs, the prison- 
ers of darkness, and fettered with the bonds of 
a long night, lay exiled, fugitives from the eternal 
providence. For while they supposed to lie hid 
in their secret sins, they were scattered under a 
dark veil of forgetfulness, being horribly aston- 
ished, and troubled w4th sights. . . . Sad visions 
appeared unto them with heavy countenances. 
No power of the fire might give them light : nei- 
ther could the bright flames of the stars endure to 
lighten that horrible night. Only there appeared 
unto them a fire kindled of itself, very dreadful : 
for being much terrified, they thought the things 
which they saw to be worse than the sight they 
saw not. . . . The whole world shined with clear 
light, and none were hindered in their labor; 
over them only was spread an heavy night, an 
image of that darkness which should afterward 
receive them : but yet were they unto themselves 
more grievous than the darkness." In this wild 
world of fantastic retribution and prophetic ter- 



CYRIL TOURNEUR 263 

ror the genius of a great English poet — if great- 
ness may be attributed to a genius which holds 
absolute command in a strictly limited province 
of reflection and emotion — was bom and lived 
and moved and had its being. The double main- 
Spring of its energy is not difficult to define: 
its component parts are simply adoration of 
good and abhorrence of evil : all other sources of 
emotion were subordinate to these: love, hate, 
resentment, resignation, self-devotion, are but 
transitory agents on this lurid and stormy stage, 
which pass away and leave only the sombre fire 
of meditative indignation still burning among the 
ruins of shattered hopes and lives. More splendid 
success in pure dramatic dialogue has not been 
achieved by Shakespeare or by Webster than by 
Cyril Toumeur in his moments of happiest in- 
vention or purest inspiration: but the intensity 
of his moral passion has broken the outline and 
marred the symmetry of his general design. And 
yet he was at all points a poet : there is an accent 
of indomitable self-reliance, a note of persist- 
ence and resistance more deep than any note of 
triumph, in the very cry of his passionate and im- 
placable dejection, which marks him as different 
in kind from the race of the great prosaic pessi- 
mists whose scorn and hatred of mankind found 
expression in the contemptuous and rancorous 



264 THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

despondency of Swift or of Carlyle. The ob- 
session of evil, the sensible prevalence of wicked- 
ness and falsehood, self-interest and stupidity, 
pressed heavily on his fierce and indignant imag- 
ination; yet not so heavily that mankind came 
to seem to him the "damned race," the hopeless 
horde of millions ' ' mostly fools ' ' too foolish or too 
foul to be worth redemption, which excited the 
laughing contempt of Frederic the Great and the 
raging contempt of his biographer. On this point 
the editor to whom all lovers of high poetry were 
in some measure indebted for the first collection 
and reissue of his works has done much less than 
justice to the poet on whose text he can scarcely 
be said to have expended an adequate or even 
a tolerable amount of pains. A reader of his in- 
troduction who had never studied the text of his 
author might be forgiven if he should carry away 
the impression that Toumeur, as a serious or 
tragic poet, was little more than a better sort of 
Byron ; a quack less impudent but not less trans- 
parent than the less inspired and more inflated 
ventriloquist of "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage": 
whereas it is hardly too much to say that the 
earnest and fiery intensity of Toumeur's moral 
rhetoric is no less unmistakable than the blatant 
and flatulent ineptitude of Byron's. 

It seems to me that Toumeur might say with 



CYRIL TOURNEUR 265 

the greatest of the popes, "I have loved justice, 
and hated iniquity: therefore I die in exile"; 
therefore, in other words, I am cast aside and left 
behind by readers who are too lazy, too soft and 
slow of spirit, too sleepily sensual and self-suffi- 
cient, to endure the fiery and purgatorial atmos- 
phere Of my work. But there are breaths from 
heaven as surely as there are blasts from hell in 
the tumultuous and electric air of it. The cyni- 
cism and egotism which the editor already men- 
tioned has the confidence to attribute to him are 
rather the outer garments than the inner qualities 
of his genius: the few and simple lines in which 
his purer and nobler characters are rapidly but 
not roughly drawn sufBce to give them all due 
relief and all requisite attraction. The virtuous 
victims of the murderous conspirator whose 
crimes and punishment are the groundwork of 
"The Atheist's Tragedy" have life and spirit 
enough to make them heartily interesting: and 
the mixed character of Sebastian, the high-heart- 
ed and gallant young libertine whose fearless 
frankness of generosity brushes aside and breaks 
away the best-laid schemes of his father, is as 
vividly and gracefully drawn as any of the same 
kind on the comic or the tragic stage. 

In this earlier of the two plays extant which 

preserve the name of Cyril Toumeur the magnifi- 
18 



266 THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

cent if grotesque extravagance of the design may 
perhaps be partly accounted for by the didactic or 
devotional aim of the designer. A more appalling 
scarecrow or scarebabe, as the contemporaries of 
his creator would have phrased it, was certainly 
never begotten by orthodoxy on horror than the 
figure of the portentous and prodigious criminal 
who here represents the practical results of in- 
dulgence in free thought. It is a fine proof of 
the author's naturally dramatic genius that this 
terrific successor of Vanini and precursor of 
Diderot should be other than a mere man of 
straw. Huge as is the wilful and deliberate ex- 
aggeration of his atrocity, there are scenes and 
passages in which his daring and indomitable 
craft is drawn with native skill as well as force 
of hand; in which it is no mere stage monster, 
but a genuine man, plausible and relentless, ver- 
satile and fearless, who comes before us now 
clothed in all the cajoleries of cunning, now 
exultant in all the nakedness of defiance. But 
indeed, although the construction of the verse 
and the composition of the play may both equally 
seem to bear witness of crude and impatient in- 
experience, there is no lack of life in any of the 
tragic or comic figures which play their part 
through these tempestuous five acts. Even so 
small a figure as the profligate Puritan parasite 



CYRIL TOURNEUR 267 

of the atheist who hires his hypocrisy to plead 
against itself is bright with touches of real rough 
humor. There is not much of this quality in 
Toumeur's work, and what there is of it is as 
bitter and as grim in feature and in flavor as 
might be expected of so fierce and passionate a 
moralist: but he knows well how to salt his in- 
vective with a due sprinkling of such sharply 
seasoned pleasantry as relieves the historic nar- 
rative of John Knox; whose " merry "^ account, 
for instance, of Cardinal Beaton's last night in 
this world has the very savor of Tourneur's tragic 
irony and implacable disgust in every vivid and 
relentless line of it. 

The execution of this poem is singularly good 
and bad: there are passages of such metrical 
strength and sweetness as will hardly be found 
in the dramatic verse of any later English poet ; 
and there are passages in which this poet's verse 
sinks wellnigh to the tragic level of a Killigrew's, 
a Shadwell's, or a Byron's. Such terminations as 
"of," "to," "with," "in," "and," "my," "your," 
preceding the substantive or the verb which 
opens the next verse, make us feel as though we 
were reading " Sardanapalus " or "The Two 
Foscari" — a sensation not easil}'' to be endured. 

1 These thingis we wreat mearelie. — Works of John Knox, 
vol. i., p. 180. 



268 THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

In a poet so far superior as Toumeur to the author 
of those abortions we must seek for an explana- 
tion of this perverse error in a transient and 
tentative theory of reaHsm rather than in an 
incurable infirmity or obliquity of talent : for no 
quality is more remarkable in the execution of 
his masterpiece than his mastery of those met- 
rical properties in which the style of this play 
is so generally deficient. Whether in dialogue 
or in monologue, "The Revenger's Tragedy" is 
so equally admirable for instinctive obedience 
to nature and imaginative magnificence of in- 
spiration, so equally perfect in the passionate 
harmony of its verse and the inspired accuracy of 
its locution, that years of study and elaboration 
might have seemed necessary to bring about this 
inexpressible improvement in expression of yet 
more sombre and more fiery thought or feeling. 
There are gleams in "The Atheist's Tragedy" of 
that clear light in which the whole Shakespearean 
world lay shining, and here and there the bright 
flames of the stars do still endure to lighten the 
gloom of it by flashes or by fits ; the gentle and 
noble young lovers, whose patient loyalty is at 
last rescued from the toils of crime to be crowned 
with happiness and honor, are painted, though 
rapidly and slightly, with equal firmness of hand 
and tenderness of touch; and there is some 



CYRIL TOURNEUR 269 

vigorous and lively humor in the lighter action 
of the comic scenes, however coarse and crude in 
handling: but there is no such relief to the terrors 
of the maturer work, whose sultrier darkness is 
visible only by the fire kindled of itself, very 
dreadful, which bums in the heart of the revenger 
whom it lights along his blood-stained way. Nor 
indeed is any relief wanted; the harmony of its 
fervent and stem emotion is as perfect, as sufh- 
cient, as sublime as the full rush and flow of its 
diction, the fiery majesty of its verse. There 
never was such a thunder-storm of a play: it 
quickens and exhilarates the sense of the reader 
as the sense of a healthy man or boy is quickened 
and exhilarated by the rolling music of a tempest 
and the leaping exultation of its flames. The 
strange and splendid genius which inspired it 
seems now not merely to feel that it does well to 
be angry, but to take such keen enjoyment in that 
feeling, to drink such deep delight from the in- 
exhaustible wellsprings of its wrath, that rage 
and scorn and hatred assume something of the 
rapturous quality more naturally proper to faith 
and hope and love. There is not a breath of rant, 
not a pad of bombast, in the declamation which 
fills its dazzling scenes with fire : the language has 
no more perfect models of style than the finest of 
its more sustained and elevated passages. The 



270 THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

verse is unlike any other man's in the solemn 
passion of its music: if it reminds us of Shake- 
speare's or of Webster's, it is simply by right of 
kinship and equality of power with the most 
vivid and sonorous verse that rings from the lips 
of Coriolanus or of Timon, of Brachiano or the 
Duchess of Malfy ; not by any servility of disciple- 
ship or reverberation of an imitative echo. It is 
so rich and full and supple, so happy in its free- 
dom and so loyal in its instinct, that its veriest 
audacities and aberrations have an indefinable 
harmony of their own. Even if we admit that 
Toumeur is to Webster but as Webster is to 
Shakespeare, we must allow, by way of exception 
to this general rule of relative rank, that in his 
noblest hours of sustained inspiration he is at 
least the equal of the greater dramatist on the 
score of sublime and burning eloquence, poured 
forth in verse like the rushing of a mighty wind, 
with fitful breaks and pauses that do but en- 
hance the majestic sweetness and perfection of 
its forward movement, the strenuous yet spon- 
taneous energy of its triumphant ardor in ad- 
vance. 

To these magnificent qualities of poetry and 
passion no critic of the slightest note or the 
smallest pretention to poetic instinct has ever 
failed to do ample and cordial justice: but to the 



CYRIL TOURNEUR 271 

truthfulness and the power of Cyril Toumeur as a 
dramatic student and painter of human character 
not only has such justice not generally been done, 
but grave injustice has been too generally shown. 
It is true that not all the agents in the evolution 
of his greater tragedy are equally or sufficiently 
realized and vivified as active and distinct figures : 
true, for instance, that the two elder sons of the 
duchess are little more than conventional outlines 
of such empty violence and futile ambition as 
might be inferred from the crude and puerile 
symbolism of their respective designations: but 
the third brother is a type no less living than 
revolting and no less dramatic than detestable: 
his ruffian cynicism and defiant brutality are in 
life and death alike original and consistent, 
whether they express themselves in curses or in 
jeers. The brother and accomplice of the hero 
in the accomplishment of his manifold revenge 
is seldom much more than a serviceable shadow : 
but there is a definite difference between their 
sister and the common type of virginal heroine 
who figures on the stage of almost every drama- 
tist then writing; the author's profound and noble 
reverence for goodness gives at once precision 
and distinction to the outline and a glow of 
active life to the color of this pure and straight- 
forward study. The brilliant simplicity of tone 



272 THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

which distinguishes the treatment of this charac- 
ter is less remarkable in the figure of the mother 
whose wickedness and weakness are so easily- 
played upon and blown about by every gust of 
penitence or temptation; but there is the same 
life-like vigor of touch in the smallest detail of 
the scenes between her children and herself. 
It has been objected that her ready avowal of 
weakness as common to all her sex is the un- 
dramatic epigram of a satirist, awkwardly ven- 
triloquizing through the mechanism of a tragic 
puppet ; but it is really quite in keeping with the 
woman's character to enlarge and extenuate the 
avowal of her own infamy and infirmity into a 
sententious reflection on womanhood in general. 
A similar objection has been raised against the 
apparent change of character implied in the con- 
fession made by the hero to the duke elect, at the 
close of the play, that he and his brother had 
murdered the old duke — "all for your grace's 
good," and in the cry when arrested and sen- 
tenced to instant execution, "Heart, was't not for 
your good, my lord?" But if this seems incom- 
patible with the high sense of honor and of wrong 
which is the mainspring of Vindice's implacable 
self-devotion and savage unselfishness, the un- 
scrupulous ferocity of the means through which 
his revenge is worked out may surely be supposed 



CYRIL TOURNEUR 273 

to have blunted the edge of his moral perception, 
distorted his natural instinct, and infected his 
nobler sympathies with some taint of contagious 
egotism and pessimistic obduracy of imagination. 
And the intensity of sympathy with which this 
crowning creation of the poet's severe and fiery 
genius is steadily developed and displayed should 
make any critic of reasonable modesty think more 
than twice or thrice before he assumes or admits 
the likelihood or the possibility of so gross an 
error or so grave a defect in the conception of so 
great an artist. For if the claim to such a title 
might be disputed in the case of a claimant who 
could show no better credentials than his author- 
ship of "The Atheist's Tragedy" — and even in 
that far from faultless work of genius there are 
manifest and manifold signs, not merely of ex- 
cellence, but of greatness — the claim of the man 
who could write "The Revenger's Tragedy" is 
questionable by no one who has any glimmering 
of insight or perception as to what qualities they 
are which confer upon a writer the indisputable 
title to a seat in the upper house of poets. 

This master work of Cyril Toumeur, the most 
perfect and most terrible incarnation of the idea 
of retribution impersonate and concentrated re- 
venge that ever haunted the dreams of a tragic 
poet or the vigils of a future tyrannicide, is re- 



274 THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

sumed and embodied in a figure as original and 
as impossible to forget, for any one who has ever 
felt the savage fascination of its presence, as 
any of the humaner figures evoked and immor- 
talized by Shakespeare. The rage of Swift, with- 
out his insanity and impurity, seems to utter in 
every word the healthier if no less consuming 
passion of a heart lacerated by indignation and 
envenomed by contempt as absolute, as relent- 
less, and as inconsolable as his own. And in the 
very torrent of the man's meditative and solitary 
passion, a very Phlegethon of agony and fury 
and ravenous hunger after the achievement of a 
desperate expiation, comes the sudden touch of 
sarcasm which serves as a momentary breakwater 
to the raging tide of his reflections, and reveals 
the else unfathomable bitterness of a spiritual 
Marah that no plummet even of his own sinking 
can sound, and no infusion of less fiery sorrow or 
less venomous remembrance can sweeten. The 
mourner falls to scoffing, the justicer becomes a 
jester: the lover, with the skull of his murdered 
mistress in his hand, slides into such reflections on 
the influence of her living beauty as would beseem 
a sexless and malignant satirist of her sex. This 
power of self - abstraction from the individual 
self, this impersonal contemplation of a personal 
wrong, this contemptuous yet passionate scrutiny 



CYRIL TOURNEUR 275 

of the very emotions which rend the heart and 
inflame the spirit and poison the very blood of 
the thinker, is the special seal or sign of original 
inspiration which distinguishes the type most 
representative of Tourneur's genius, most signif- 
icant of its peculiar bias and its peculiar force. 
Such a conception, clothed in mere prose or in 
merely passable verse, would be proof sufficient 
of the mental power which conceived it; when 
expressed in such verse as follows, it proves at 
once and preserves forever the claim of the de- 
signer to a place among the immortals : 

Thou sallow picture of my poisoned love, 
My study's ornament, thou shell of death, 
Once the bright face of my betrothed lady, 
When life and beauty naturally filled out 
These ragged imperfections; 
When two heaven-pointed diamonds were set 
In these unsightly rings; — then 'twas a face 
So far beyond the artificial shine 
Of any woman's bought complexion 
That the uprightest man (if such there be, 
That sin btit seven times a day) broke custom 
And made up eight with looking after her. 

The very fall of the verse has a sort of fierce 
and savage pathos in the note of it; a cadence 
which comes nearer to the echo of such laughter 
as utters the cry of an anguish too deep for weep- 
ing and wailing, for curses or for prayers, than 



276 THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

anything in dramatic poetry outside the part of 
Hamlet. It would be a conjecture not less 
plausible than futile, though perhaps not less 
futile than plausible, which should suggest that 
the influence of Shakespeare's Hamlet may be 
responsible for the creation of Toumeur's Vindice, 
and the influence of Toumeur's Vindice for the 
creation of Shakespeare's Timon. It is a cer- 
tainty indisputable except by the blatant au- 
dacity of immedicable ignorance that the only 
poet to whose manner and style the style and 
manner of Cyril Toumeur can reasonably be said 
to bear any considerable resemblance is William 
Shakespeare. The more curt and abrupt style 
of Webster is equally unlike the general style of 
either. And if, as his first editor observes, "the 
parallel" between Toumeur and Marston, "as 
far as it goes, is so obvious that it is not worth 
drawing," it is no less certain that the diverence 
between the genius which created Andrugio and 
the genius which created Vindice is at least as 
wide as the points of resemblance or affinity be- 
tween them are vivid and distinct. While Mar- 
ston's imaginative and tragic power was at its 
highest, his style was crude and quaint, turgid 
and eccentric ; when he had cured and purified it 
— perhaps, as Gifford suggests, in consequence 
of Ben Jonson's unmerciful but salutary ridicule 



CYRIL TOURNEUR 277 

— he approved himself a far abler writer of 
comedy or tragicomedy than before, but his 
right hand had forgotten its cunning as the hand 
of "a tragic penman." Now the improvement 
of Toumeur's style, an improvement amounting 
to little less than transfiguration, keeps time with 
his advance as a student of character and a tragic 
dramatist as distinguished from a tragic poet. 
The style of his earlier play has much of beauty, 
of facility, and of freshness : the style of his later 
play, I must repeat, is comparable only with 
Shakespeare's. In the superb and inexhaustible 
imprecations of Timon there is a quality which 
reminds us of Cyril Toumeur as delightfully as we 
are painfully reminded of John Marston in read- 
ing certain scenes and passages which disfigure 
and deface the magnificent but incomprehensible 
composition of "Troilus and Cressida." 

Of Toumeur's two elegies on the death of Sir 
Francis Vere and of Henry Prince of Wales, it 
may be said that they are about as good as 
Chapman's work of the same order: and it may 
be added that his first editor has shown himself, 
to say the least, unreasonably and unaccountably 
virulent in his denunciation of what he assumes to 
be insincere and sycophantic in the elegiac ex- 
pression of the poet's regret for a prince of such 
noble promise as the elder brother of Charles I. 



2 78 THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

The most earnest and fervent of republicans, if 
not wanting in common-sense and common cour- 
tesy, would not dream of reflecting in terms of 
such unqualified severity on the lamentation of 
Lord Tennyson for the loss of Albert the Good: 
and the warmest admirer of that loudly lamented 
person will scarcely maintain that this loss was 
of such grave importance to England as the loss 
of a prince who might probably have preserved 
the country from the alternate oppression of pre- 
lates and of Puritans, from the social tyranny 
of a dictator and the political disgrace of the 
Restoration. 

The existence of a comedy by the author of 
"The Revenger's Tragedy," and of a comedy 
bearing the suggestive if not provocative title of 
"Laugh and Lie Down," must always have 
seemed to the students of Lowndes one of the 
most curious and amusing pieces of information 
to be gathered from the " Bibliographer's Man- 
ual;" and it is with a sense of disappointment 
proportionate to this sense of curiosity that they 
will discover the non-existence of such a comedy, 
and the existence in its stead of a mere pamphlet 
in prose issued under that more than promising 
title: which yet, if attainable, ought surely to be 
reprinted, however dubious may be its claim 
to the honor of a great poet's authorship. In 



CYRIL TOURNEUR 279 

no case can it possibly be of less interest or value 
than the earliest extant publication of that poet 
— "The Transformed Metamorphosis." Its first 
editor has given proof of very commendable 
perseverance and fairly creditable perspicacity 
in his devoted attempt at elucidation of this 
most astonishing and indescribable piece of work : 
but no interpretation of it can hope to be more 
certain or more trustworthy than any possible 
exposition of Blake's "Jerusalem" or the Apoc- 
alypse of St. John. All that can be said by a 
modest and judicious reader is that any one of 
these three effusions may unquestionably mean 
anything that anybody chooses to read into the 
text; that a Luther is as safe as a Loyola, that a 
Renan is no safer than a Gumming, from the 
chance of confutation as a less than plausible 
exponent of its possible significance: but that, 
however indisputable it may be that they were 
meant to mean something, not many human 
creatures who can be trusted to go abroad with- 
out a keeper will be likely to pretend to a positive 
understanding of what that significance may be. 
To me, the most remarkable point in Tourneur's 
problematic poem is the fact that this most 
monstrous example of senseless and barbarous 
jargon that ever disfigured English type should 
have been written — were it even for a wager — 



28o THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

by one of the purest, simplest, most exquisite 
and most powerful writers in the language. 

This extraordinary effusion is the single and 
certainly the sufficient tribute of a great poet, 
and a great master of the purest and the no- 
blest English, to the most monstrous and pre- 
posterous taste or fashion of his time. As the 
product of an eccentric imbecile it would be no 
less curious than Stanihurst's Virgil : as the work 
of Cyril Toumeur it is indeed "a miracle instead 
of wit. ' ' For it cannot be too often repeated that 
in mere style, in commanding power and purity of 
language, in positive instinct of expression and di- 
rect eloquence of inspiration, the author of "The 
Revenger's Tragedy" stands alone in the next 
rank to Shakespeare. Many if not most of their 
contemporaries could compose a better play than 
he probably could conceive — a play with finer 
variation of incidents and daintier diversity of 
characters: not one of them, not even Webster 
himself, could pour forth poetry of such con- 
tinuous force and flow. The fiery jet of his 
molten verse, the rush of its radiant and rhythmic 
lava, seems alone as inexhaustible as that of 
Shakespeare's. As a dramatist, his faults are 
doubtless as flagrant as his merits are manifest: 
as a writer, he is one of the very few poets who in 
their happiest moments are equally faultless and 



CYRIL TOURNEUR 281 

sublime. The tone of thought or of feeling which 
gives form and color to this splendid poetic style 
is so essentially what modem criticism would 
define as that of a natural Hebraist, and so 
far from that of a Hellenist or Latinist of the 
Renascence, that we recognize in this great poet 
one more of those Englishmen of genius on whom 
the direct or indirect influence of the Hebrew 
Bible has been actually as great as the influences 
of the countr\- and the century in which they 
happened to be born. The single-hearted fury 
of unselfish and devoted indignation which ani- 
mates every line of his satire is more akin to the 
spirit of Ezekiel or Isaiah than to the spirit of 
Juvenal or Persius: though the fierce literality 
of occasional detail, the prosaic accuracy of im- 
placable and introspective abhorrence, may seem 
liker the hard Roman style of impeachment 
by photography than the great Hebrew method 
of denunciation by appeal. But the fusion of 
sarcastic realism with imaginative passion pro- 
duces a compound of such peculiar and fiery 
flavor as we taste only from the tragic chalice 
of Tourneur or of Shakespeare. The bitterness 
which serves but as a sauce or spice to the medi- 
tative rhapsodies of Marston's heroes or of Web- 
ster's villains is the dominant quality of the 
meats and wines served up on the stage which 



282 tHE Age of SHAKESPEARE 

echoes to the cry of Vindice or of Timon. But 
the figure of Toumeur's typic hero is as distinct 
in its difference from the Shakespearean figure 
which may possibly have suggested it as in its 
difference from the Shakespearean figure which 
it may not impossibly have suggested. There is 
perhaps too much play made with skulls and 
cross-bones on the stage of Cyril Toumeur: he 
cannot apparently realize the fact that they are 
properties of which a thoughtful poet's use should 
be as temperate and occasional as Shakespeare's : 
but the graveyard meditations of Hamlet, perfect 
in dramatic tact and instinct, seem cool and com- 
mon and shallow in sentiment when set beside the 
intensity of inspiration which animates the fitful 
and impetuous music of such passages as these: 

Here 's an eye 
Able to tempt a great man — to serve God; 
A pretty hanging lip, that has forgot now to dissemble. 
Methinks this mouth should make a swearer tremble, 
A drunkard clasp his teeth, and not undo 'em 
To suffer wet damnation to run through 'em. 
Here's a cheek keeps her color let the wind go whistle; 
Spout, rain, we fear thee not: be hot or cold, 
All 's one with us; and is not he absurd. 
Whose fortunes are upon their faces set 
That fear no other God but wind and wet? 

Hippolito. Brother, y'ave spoke that right; 
Is this the face that living shone so bright? 

Vindice. The very same. 
And now methinks I could e'en chide myself 



CYRIL TOURNEUR 283 

For doting on her beauty, though her death 

Shall be revenged after no common action. 

Does the silk-worm expend her yellow labors 

For thee? for thee does she undo herself? 

Are lordships sold to maintain ladyships 

For the poor benefit of a bewitching minute?' 

Why does yon fellow falsify highways 

And put his life between the judge's lips, 

To refine such a thing, keeps horse and men 

To beat their valors for her? 

Surely we're all mad people, and they^ 

Whom we think are, are not: we mistake those: 

'Tis we are mad in sense, they but in clothes. 

Hippolito. 'Faith, and in clothes too we, give us our 
due, 

Vindice. Does every proud and self-affecting dame 
Camphire her face for this ? and grieve her Maker 
In sinful baths of milk — when many an infant starves, 
For her superfluous outside, — all for this? 

What follows is no whit less noble: but as 
much may be said of the whole part — and indeed 
of the whole play. Violent and extravagant as 
the mere action or circumstance may be or may 
appear, there is a trenchant straightforwardness 

* This is not, I take it, one of the poet's irregular though 
not unmusical lines; the five short unemphatic syllables, 
rapidly run together in one slurring note of scorn, being not 
more than equivalent in metrical weight to three such as 
would take their places if the verse were thus altered — and 
impaired : 

For the poor price of one bewitching minute. 

^ Perhaps we might venture here to read — ' ' and only 
they." In the next line, "whom" for "who" is probably 
the poet's own license or oversight. 



284 THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

of appeal in the simple and spontaneous magnif- 
icence of the language, a depth of insuppressible 
sincerity in the fervent and restless vibration of 
the thought, by which the hand and the brain 
and the heart of the workman are equally rec- 
ognizable. But the crowning example of Cyril 
Toumeur's unique and incomparable genius is of 
course to be found in the scene which would as- 
suredly be remembered, though e\ery other line 
of the poet's writing were forgotten, by the in- 
fluence of its passionate inspiration on the more 
tender but not less noble sympathies of Charles 
Lamb. Even the splendid exuberance of eulogy 
which attributes to the verse of Toumeur a more 
fiery quality, a more thrilling and piercing note 
of sublime and agonizing indignation, than that 
which animates and inflames the address of 
Hamlet to a mother less impudent in infamy than 
Vindice's cannot be considered excessive by any 
capable reader who will candidly and carefully 
compare the two scenes which suggested this 
comparison. To attempt the praise or the de- 
scription of anything that has been praised or 
described by Lamb would usually be the veriest 
fatuity of presumption : and yet it is impossible to 
write of a poet whose greatness was first revealed 
to his countrymen by the greatest critic of 
dramatic poetry that ever lived and wrote, and 



CYRIL TOURNEUR 285 

not to echo his words of righteous judgment and 
inspired applause with more or less feebleness of 
reiteration. The startling and magical power of 
single verses, ineffaceable and ineradicable from 
the memory on which they have once impressed 
themselves, the consciousness in which they have 
once struck root, which distinguishes and de- 
notes the peculiar style of Cyril Toumeur's 
tragic poetry, rises to its highest tidemark in 
this part of the play. Every other line, one 
might almost say, is an instance of it; and yet 
not a single line is undramatic, or deficient in the 
strictest and plainest dramatic propriety. It 
may be objected that men and women possessed 
by the excitement of emotions so desperate and 
so dreadful do not express them with such pas- 
sionate precision of utterance: but, to borrow the 
saying of a later and more famous bearer of the 
name which Cyril sometimes spelled as Turner, 
"don't they wish they could?" or rather, ought 
they not to wish it ? What is said by the speak- 
ers is exactly what they might be expected to 
think, to feel, and to express with less incisive 
power and less impressive accuracy of ardent 
epigram or of strenuous appeal.' 

' It is, to say the least, singular to find in the most fa- 
mous scene of a play so often reprinted and re-edited a word 
which certainly requires explanation passed over without re- 



286 THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

There are among poets, as there are among 
prose writers, some whose pecuHar power finds 
vent only in a broad and rushing stream of speech 

mark from any one of the successive editors. When Grati- 
ana, threatened by the daggers of her sons, exclaims: 

Are you so barbarous to set iron nipples 
Upon the breast that gave you suck? 

Vindice retorts, in reply to her appeal: 

That breast 
Is turned to quarled poison. 

This last epithet is surely unusual enough to call for some 
attempt at interpretation. But none whatever has hitherto 
been offered. In the seventh line following from this one 
there is another textual difficulty. The edition now before 
me, Eld's of 1608, reads literally thus: 

Vind. Ah ist possible, Thou onely, you powers on hie. 
That women should dissemble when they die. 

Lamb was content to read. 

Ah, is it possible, you powers on high, 

and so forth. Perhaps the two obviously corrupt words in 
italics may contain a clew to the right reading, and this may 
be it: 

Ah! 

Is't possible, you heavenly powers on high. 

That women should dissemble when they die? 

Or may not this be yet another instance of the Jew-Puritan 
abhorrence of the word God as an obscene or blasphemous 
term when uttered outside the synagogue or the conventicle ? 
If so, we might read — and believe that the poet wrote — 
Is't possible, thou only God on high, 

and assume that the licenser struck out the indecent monosyl- 
lable and left the mutilated text for actors and printers to 
patch or pad at their discretion. 



CYRIL TOURNEUR 287 

or song, triumphant by the general force and 
fulness of its volume, in which we no more think 
of looking for single lines or phrases that may be 
detached from the context and quoted for their 
separate effect than of selecting for peculiar ad- 
miration some special wave or individual ripple 
from the multitudinous magnificence of the tor- 
rent or the tide. There are others whose power 
is shown mainly in single strokes or flashes as of 
lightning or of swords. There are few indeed 
outside the pale of the very greatest who can 
display at will their natural genius in the keenest 
concentration or the fullest effusion of its powers. 
But among these fewer than few stands the au- 
thor of "The Revenger's Tragedy." The great 
scene of the temptation and the triumph of Cas- 
tiza would alone be enough to give evidence, not 
adequate merely but ample, that such praise as 
this is no hyperbole of sympathetic enthusiasm, 
but simply the accurate expression of an indis- 
putable fact. No lyrist, no satirist, could have 
excelled in fiery flow of rhetoric the copious and 
impetuous eloquence of the lines, at once luxuri- 
ous and sardonic, cynical and seductive, in which 
Vindice pours forth the arguments and rolls out 
the promises of a professional pleader on behalf 
of aspiring self-interest and sensual self-indul- 
gence: no dramatist that ever lived could have 



288 THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 

put more vital emotion into fewer words, more 
passionate reality into more perfect utterance, 
than Toumeur in the dialogue that follows 
them: 

Mother. Troth, he says true. 

Castiza. False: I defy you both: 

I have endured you with an ear of fire: 
Your tongues have struck hot irons on my face. 
Mother, come from that poisonous woman there. 

Mother. Where? 

Castiza. Do you not see her? she's too inward then. 

I could not count the lines which on reperusal 
of this great tragic poem I find apt for illustrative 
quotation, or suggestive of a tributary comment : 
but enough has already been cited to prove be- 
yond all chance of cavil from any student worthy 
of the name that the place of Cyril Toumeur is 
not among minor poets, nor his genius of such a 
temper as naturally to attract the sympathy or 
arouse the enthusiasm of their admirers; that 
among the comrades or the disciples who to us 
may appear but as retainers or satellites of Shake- 
speare his rank is high and his credentials to that 
rank are clear. That an edition more carefully 
revised and annotated, with a text reduced to 
something more of coherence and intelligible ar- 
rangement, than has yet been vouchsafed to us, 
would suffice to place his name among theirs of 



CYRIL TOURNEUR 289 

whose eminence the very humblest of their edu- 
cated countrymen are ashamed to seem igno- 
rant, it would probably be presumptuous to 
assert. But if the noblest ardor of moral emo- 
tion, the most fervent passion of eager and in- 
dignant sympathy with all that is best and ab- 
horrence of all that is worst in women or in men 
— if the most absolute and imperial command of 
all resources and conquest of all difficulties in- 
herent in the most effective and the most various 
instrument ever yet devised for the poetry of the 
tragic drama — if the keenest insight and the 
sublimest impulse that can guide the perception 
and animate the expression of a poet whose line 
of work is naturally confined to the limits of 
moral or ethical tragedy — if all these qualities 
may be admitted to confer a right to remem- 
brance and a claim to regard, there can be no 
fear and no danger of forgetfulness for the name 
of Cyril Toumeur. 



INDEX 



Action, relation to charac- 
ter, 245. 

Adventure, subject for drama, 
242. 

^schylus, Shakespeare com- 
pared with, 31; Webster 
compared with, 52. 

Allegory, 102, 168, 170, 179, 
180. 

Alleyn, 189. 

"All Fools" (Chapman), 259. 

"All's Lost by Lust," 196. 

Amadis, 214. 

"Amboyna" (Dryden), 82. 

" Amphitruo," the, 217. 

"Antipodes, The," 252. 

Antiquary, The (Scott), 84. 

"Antonio and Mellida" 
(Marston), 30, 116, 117, 
122, 124, 145, 148. 

"Antonio's Revenge" (Mars- 
ton), 122. 

" Anything for a Quiet Life" 
(Middleton), 163. 

" Appius and Virginia " (Web- 
ster), 198. 

Arbuthnot, 228. 

Ariosto, no. 

Aristophanes, Middleton 
compared with, 169; cari- 
caturist, 206. 

Armada, 168, 206. 

Arnold, Matthew, on Chap- 
man, 107. 



Asdrubal, speech of (Mars- 
ton), 118. 
"Asolani," 209. 
" Astrasa Redux," authorship, 

157- 
Astrophel and Stella, 66. 
"Atheist's Tragedy, The" 

(Tourneur), 265; reflects 

the age, 268, 273. 
Athens, 169. 
Audience in Shakespeare's 

age, 170, 245. 

"Bachelor's Banquet, 
The" (Dekker), 97. 

Bacon, Francis, 68, 256. 

Balzac, Shakespeare and 
Marlowe compared with, 
T,^ ; Dekker compared with, 
108. 

Barkstead, William, 136. 

Barnfield, 50. 

"Bartholomew Fair" (Mars- 
ton), 122. 

Beaumont, 172; and Fletcher, 
182, 225. 

"Beggars' Bush" (Fletcher), 
178. 

"Bellman of London, The," 
(Dekker), 10 1. 

Bembo, Pietro, 209. 

Bible, Hebrew, influence of, 
281. 

Biographer's Manual, 278, 



292 



THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 



Biographical Chronicle of the 
English Drama (Fleay), 
205. 

Bishop Hall, 163. 

Blake, William, Dekker com- 
pared to, 72; "Jerusalem," 
279. 

Blank verse, i, 2, 224. 

" Blind Beggar of Alexan- 
dria, The " ( Chapman ) , 

193- 

Boccaccio, Dekker compared 
with. 108. 

Boswell, 162. 

"Brazen Age, The," 218. 

"Britannia's Honor," 84. 

British Museum, 193. 

Brome, 252. 

Bronte, Charlotte, 40, 

Browning, Hey wood com- 
pared with, 236. 

Bullen, on Marston, 135; on 
Elizabethan songs, 137; on 
Marlowe, 151; on Middle- 
ton, 154, 163, 165, 168, 
172, 179, 181; on Heywood, 
228, 230. 235. 

Burbage, 189. 

" Bussy d'Ambois" (Chap- 
man), 259. 

" Butcher's Story, The," 160. 

Butler, parody Cat and Puss, 
226. 

Byron, 3, 38; Jonson com- 
pared with, 71, 201, 267; 
Tourneur compared with, 
264. 

Cade, Jack, ii. 

"Caesar and Pompey," 259. 

Campbell, Thomas, on Web- 
ster, 37. 

"Canaan's Calamity," 92. 

"Captives, The," 230. 

Caricature, motive in drama, 
206. 



Carlyle, 93; definition of gen- 
ius, 109, 207 ; Tourneur 
compared with, 264. 

Carr, Robert, 256. 

Cat and Puss (Butler), 226. 

Catholic formula, 191. 

"Catiline his Conspiracy" 
(Jonson), 144. 

Caxton, 213, 214, 219. 

"Cenci" (Shelley), 16. 

Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles, 93. 

" Challenge for Beauty, The" 
(Heywood), 212, 231, 234, 
235. 

Chalmers on Queen Elizabeth, 
69. 

"Changeling, The" (Middle- 
ton), 30, 186. 

Chapman, George (255-261), 
Matthew Arnold on, 107; 
part in "Eastward Ho!", 
129, 130; plays unedited, 
152; "Blind Beggar," 193; 
in Germany, 255; transla- 
tion of Juvenal, 256; faults 
of style, 257; Homer, 258; 
Keats on, 258; sources 
from French history, 258; 
Shelley on, 258 ; tragedy 
and comedy, 259; contact 
with Shakespeare, 260; feel- 
ing toward:other poets, 260. 

"Chaste Maid at Cheapside, 
A," Middleton and Shir- 
ley (?), 163. 

Chaucer, i, 72; Middleton 
compared with, 177, 247. 

Chester, Sir Robert, 137, 138. 

Chettle, 72, 87, 205. 

"Childe Harold's Pilgrim- 
age," 264. 

"Chronicle History of Thomas 
Lord Cromwell," 19. 

" Chronographicall History of 
all the Kings " (Heywood), 



INDEX 



293 



"Christmas Carol, A," 229 

Chronicle plays, 203,206, 207, 
208. 

Clown, the, 230, 236. 

Coleridge, on Beaumont and 
Fletcher, 29; on Dekker, 
88, 150; love of country, 
202, 254; on Chapman, 
258. 

Collier, on Marlowe, 7. 

Collingwood, 254. 

Colman, George, 231. 

Comedy. French and Latin. 
133; early specimens, 156, 
157; in Dekker, Jonson. 
Shakespeare, and Middle- 
ton, 158. 

" Conquest of Granada, The," 
226. 

" Contention between the two 
Famous Houses, etc.," 9. 

"Contes Drolatiques," 161. 

"Coriolanus," 270. 

Corneille, treatment of Psy- 
che, 222. 

Couplet, in dramatic verse, 
204; treatment by Jonson, 
Marlowe, Shakespeare, 205. 

Critics, incompetence, 37, 38. 

"Cure for a Cuckold, A," 24. 

Daniel, "Defence of 
Rhyme," 107. 

Dante, Webster compared 
with, ^^, 52; Marston com- 
pared with, 119; love of 
country, 202. 

Day, 87, 205. 

" Dead Term, The" (Dekker), 
102. 

Decameron, 93. 

" Defence of Rhyme," 107. 

Dekker, Thomas (61 -112); 
coUab. with Webster, 19; 
part in "Westward Ho!", 
20; comic style, 21, 158; 



collab. with Marston and 
Middleton, 30 ; Francois 
Villon compared with, 61, 
62; tenderness like Shake- 
speare, 62; compared with 
Jonson, 69-71; with Blake 
and Shell e y , 7 2 ; moral 
force, 73; satirist, 75; Hunt 
and Hazlitt on, 78; com- 
pared with Webster, Ford, 
and Middleton, 81; with 
Massinger, 87 ; Coleridge 
on, 88; Kingsley on, 89. 90; 
compared with Dickens. 
ro2, 107: modern writers 
compared with, 106-108; 
humorist, 106; style com- 
pared with Dryden, 107: 
likened to Boccaccio, 108; 
as man and poet, 112; 
plays unedited, 152; collab. 
with Middleton, 161 ; alle- 
gory compared with Mid- 
dleton, 168; Rowley com- 
pared with, 191, 193; faults, 
194; imitated by Rowley, 
195; use of foreign words, 
247. 

Deloney, Thomas, 91, 92. 

Demonology, 161. 

Desdemona, type of hero- 
ine, 57. 

Devereux, Robert, 256. 

" Devil's Answer to Pierce 
Penniless, The " (Dekker) 

95- 
"Devil's Law-case, The' 
(Webster), 25, 27, 30, 32 

49. 53- 
"Dick of Devonshire," 235 
Dickens, Dekker compared 

with, 102, 107, 160; Mid' 

dleton compared with, 163 
Diderot, 266. 
"Dido, Queen of Carthage' 

(Marlowe), 8. 



294 



THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 



Dilke, Old Plays, 154. 

"Dr. Faustus" (Marlowe), 2, 

4, 6, II. 
Dodsley's Old Plays, 195. 
Don Juan, 214. 
Donne, John, 126, 257. 
Don Quixote, 229. 
"Double PP, The, etc.," 97. 
Drake, Sir Francis, 18. 
Dramatic poetry, evolution 

of, 216. 
"Dream, The" (Dekker), 

100. 
Drue, Thomas, 207. 
Dryden, 82; Dekker com- 
pared with, 107, 157, 221, 

226. 
"Duchess of Malfy, The" 

(Webster), 16, 32, 37, 53, 

55, 270. 
"Duchess of Suffolk, The," 

207. 
" Duke of Milan, The," 30. 
"Dutch Courtesan, The" 

(Marston), 122, 130-133, 

146. 
Dyce, II, 22, 23, 76, 151, 153, 

180; on Webster, 40; on 

Middleton, 154, 157, 172; 

on Hey wood, 232. 

"Earthly Paradise, The," 

215- 
"Eastward Ho!", 129, 130. 
" Ecole des Maris," 134. 
"Edward H." (Marlowe), 6, 

208. 
Elegies, Ovid's, 12; Tour- 

neur's, 277 ; Tennyson's, 

278. 
' ' Englishmen for My Money," 

85- 
English language, dignity, 

228. 
"English Traveller, The," 

240. 



"Entertainment" (Marston), 

136. 
Essex, Earl of, 256. 
Euphuism, 147. 
Euripides, 37, 169. 

"Fair Maid of the Ex- 
change, The," 237. 

" Fair Maid of the Inn, The" 
(Fletcher), 26. 

" Fair Maid of the West, The " 
(Heywood), 212, 241, 243. 

"Fair Quarrel, A" (Middle- 
ton), 165, 167. 

Falstaff, 179. 

" Family of Love, The" (Mid- 
dleton), 159, 181. 

"Famous History of Sir 
Thomas Wyatt, The," 19. 

"Fatal Curiosity" (Hey- 
wood), 239. 

First great English poet, i , 189. 

Flamineo, 48, 52. 

Fleay, Biographical Chronicle, 
205; on Heywood, 228, 246, 
249. 

Fletcher, " Fair Maid of the 
Inn, The," 26; Webster 
compared with, 26; trag- 
ic poet, 30; compared with 
Shakespeare, 65; comic 
style, 165; metrical beauty, 
172, 174; Middleton com- 
pared with, 172, 174, 178; 
coUab. with Beaumont, 
182; realism, 214; Hey- 
wood compared with, 232; 
faults, 234; " Flitcher," 
237; Chapman's feeling 
toward, 260. 

Ford, 81, 172, 177. 

Foreign words, abuse of, 246. 

" Fortune by Land and Sea," 
243, 244. 

" Four Brides of Noah's Ark, 
106. 



INDEX 



295 



" Four Prentices of London, 
The," 193, 225, 228. 

Francis I., 258. 

Franklin, 254. 

French comedy, 133. 

French history, source for 
Chapman, 258. 

Froissart, 229. 

"Game at Chess, A," 157, 

Gautier, 231. 

"Gentle Craft, The" (Dek- 
ker), 64. 

"Gentleman Usher, The" 
(Chapman), 259. 

German criticism, 19. 

Giflford, on Dekker and Jon- 
son, 69, 70, 90; on Mars- 
ton, 122, 276. 

Gil Bias, 210. 

Giocondo, no. 

"Gloriana" (Lee), 82. 

Glover, 38. 

God , as term in literature ,286. 

Goethe, on Marlowe, 2, 3. 

"Golden Age, The" (Hey- 
wood), 216. 

Goldsmith, Dekker compared 
with, 106. 

Greene, Robert, 50, 73, 10 1. 

Grenville, Richard, 18. 

"Grim the Collier of Croy- 
don," 84. 

Grosart, Barnfield, 51; on 
Dekker, 91, 99; on Mars- 
ton, 126. 

"Gull's Hornbook, The" 
(Dekker), 97. 

Hall, 125. 

Hallam on HeyTvood, 3, 199, 
232. 

"Hamlet," 144, 176, 179; in- 
fluence on Tourneur, 276, 
282, 284. 



Haughton, 73, 87. 

Hazlitt, on Dekker, 78, 79, 
181, 190; on Heywood, 201. 

Hebrew Bible, influence of, 
281. 

" Heliogabalus," 231. 

Henry IV., reign of, 258. 

Henry, Prince of Wales, 256. 

"Hero and Leander" (Mar- 
lowe), 13, 136, 256. 

Heroine, orthodox ideal of, 
247; cf. also 157 note. 

Hesiod, 256. 

Heywood, Thomas (200- 
254), realism, 65, 215; 
"The Royal King," etc., 
193; characters from life, 
201; love of country, 202; 
of London, 202 ; pathos 
and humor, 204; patriot- 
ism, 210; imitator of Theoc- 
ritus, 214; William Morris 
compared with, 215; power 
of condensation, 217; char- 
acter as poet, 224, 225; in- 
fluence of civic services, 
226; compared with Fletch- 
er, 232 ; best play, 233, 
234; national quality in, 
236, 254; dramatic force, 
245; disciple of Jonson, 
251; prose, 253; story-tell- 
ing, 253. 

"Hierarchie of the Blessed 
Angels, The" (Heywood), 
212. 

" Hippolytus," 37. 

History, treatment on stage, 
18, 19. 

" Histriomatrix," 126, 139, 
140. 

Hogarth, 158. 

Homer, 220; Chapman on, 
255-261. 

" Honest Whore, The," Web- 
ster's part in, 21; Dekker's, 



296 



THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 



74, 75; Middleton's and 

Rowley's, 183. 
Hood, 138. 
Horace, 143. 
Home, 152. 
" How to Choose a Good 

Wife from a Bad" (Hey- 

wood), 247. 
Hugo, Victor, son of. 4; 33. 

38; Dekker compared with, 

74- 
Hunt, Leigh, on Dekker. 78: 

on Middleton 154. 
■"Hymns" (Homer). 256. 

" If you know not me." 206. ' 

■■ IHad." Chapman's transla- 
tion, 255. 

"Inner-Temple Masque, 
The," 179. 

"Insatiate Countess, The" 
(Marston), 135. 

" Iron Age, The," 216, 220. 

Italian influence, 73, 103,119, 
148, 247. 

"Jack Drum's Entertain- 
ment," 126, 142. 

Jeronimo, 167. 

"Jerusalem" (Blake), 279. 

"Jests to make you merry" 
(Dekker), 99. 

' ' Jew of Malta ' ' (Marlowe) , 5 ; 
compared with " Dr. Faus- 
tus," 6; with "King Rich- 
ard II.," II, 189. 

' ' Jocondo and Astolf o " (Dek- 
ker), no. 

Johnson, Dr., 162, 237. 

Jones, Inigo, 256. 

Jonson, Ben, compared with 
Shakespeare, 65; "Poetas- 
ter," 68 ; compared with 
Dekker, 69, 70, in; collab- 
oration with Dekker, 71; 
court characters, 85; in- 



fluence on Marston, 122; 
"Catiline," 144; character 
invention, 158; compared 
with Middleton, 165, 172; 
treatment of couplet, 205; 
model for other poets of 
the age, 222, 237; friend 
of Chapman, 256; model 
for Hey wood, 251; Chap- 
man's feeling toward, 260; 
ridicules Marston, 276. 
Juvenal. Tourneur akin to, 
281. 

Keats. 223: on Chapman. 
258. 

Killigrew. 2(17. 

King Brute. 213. 

"King Edward III.," 12. 

"King Edward IV.," 203, 
230. 

" King Henry VI.," Marlowe's 
part in, 9. 

" King Henry VIII.," Fletch- 
er's part in, 174. 

King James, 129; demonol- 
ogy, 161, 213, 256. 

"King Lear," 16, 31, 176. 

"King Richard II.," 6, 208. 

Kingsley, on Webster, 42; on 
Dekker, 89, 90. 

" Knight's Conjuring, A," 95. 

Knox, John, 267. 

La Fontaine, no. 

Lamb, Charles, 21, 151, 190; 
on Dekker, 63, 66, 78, 
162; on Marston, 122, 123; 
on Webster, 140; on Hey- 
wood, 152, 200, 202, 205, 
211, 214, 219, 225, 226, 
237; on Middleton, 153, 
165, 167, 177; on Rowley, 
187, 197-199, 202; onChap- 
man, 258, 259; on Tour- 
neur, 284. 



INDEX 



297 



Landor, Walter Savage, 120, 
166; onMarston, 137; Row- 
ley compared with, 199. 

"Lantern and Candle-light" 
(Dekker), loi. 

"La Reine d'Espagne," 232. 

Latin comedy, 133. 

Latter-day Pamphlets," 93. 

Latouche, Henri de, 232. 

" Laugh and Lie Down," 278. 

Lee, "Gloriana," 82. 

"Life of MerHn, surnamed 
Ambrosius ' ' (Hey wood) , 
112. 

Lillo, 239. 

"Lingua," 170. 

Little Dorrit, 100. 

London, 11, 203, 214, 245. 

"London's Tempe," 84. 

Longfellow, 38. 

"Love's Mistress," 222. 

Lowndes, 278. 

"Loyal Subject, The" 
(Fletcher), 232. 

Lucrezia Borgia, 209. 

"Lust's Dominion," 85, 152. 

" Lycidas," 157. 

Lyly, parody on "Antonio 
and Mellida," 147. 

Lyric poetry before Shake- 
speare, 242. 

MACAULAY.on Milton, 104. 

" Macbeth," relation to " The 
Witch," 172, 252. 

Machiavelli, 84. 

"Mad World, My Masters, 
A'_' (Middleton), 160. 

"Maid's Tragedy, The," 30. 

"Maidenhead Well Lost, A," 
231. 

' ' Malcontent , The ' ' (Mars- 
ton), 22, 116; Webster'? 
part in, 124, 129. 

Mallory, 229. 

"Manfred," 3. 



Mantalini, 24. 

Marlowe, Christopher (1-14), 
influence on Shelley, i, 13; 
on Milton, 5; on Nathaniel 
Lee, 7; compared with 
Shakespeare, 7, 194, 208; 
comic spirit, 10, 11; trans- 
lations of Ovid and Lucan, 
12; lyric quality, 13; place 
in literature, 14; compared 
with Webster, 1,7,, 58, 59; 
impostures of, 85; BuUen's 
edition, 151; Middleton 
compared with ,172; model 
for others, 178; first great 
poet of England, 1 89; treat- 
ment of couplet, 205, 260. 

Marmion, 222. 

Marston, John, (112-149), 
tragic spirit compared with 
Webster's, 17, 30, 59; col- 
laboration with Webster, 
22; relations with Jonson, 
112, 113, 127; tragic style 
compared with Webster, 
Tourneur, Shakespeare, 
114; characters, 115, 116; 
compared with Sophocles, 
Tacitus, Dante, 117, 119; 
influenced by Jonson, 122, 
collaboration with, 140, 
141; place among poets, 
144; compared with Jon- 
son, 146; satirist, 179; 
compared with Tourneur, 
276, 277, 281; ridiculed by 
Jonson, 276. 

Mary Tudor, 207. 

"Massacre at Paris" (Mar- 
lowe), 7, 10. 

Massinger, 30, 87, 90, 194, 

237- 
"Match at Midnight, A" 

(Rowley), 192. 
"Match Me in London" 

(Dekker), 84, 



298 



THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 



" Mayor of Queenborough, 
The," 167. 

"Medea," tne, 37. 

Meltun Society, 157 note. 

"Menaechmi. The," 217. 

' ' Michaelmas Term ' ' (Mid- 
dleton), 158. 

" Microcynicon," 179. 

Middleton, Thomas (150- 
187), place as tragic poet, 
30; associated with Dekker, 
75-77, 87; poet of city, 85; 
comic style, 158; associated 
with Rowley and Dekker, 
161; "The Widow," 165; 
allegory compared with 
Dekker's, 168; obligations 
to Shakespeare. 172; com- 
pared with Chaucer, 177; a 
second poet by same name 
( ?), 180; collaboration with 
Rowley, 182; comedy, 190; 
cf. "Meddletun," 237. 

"Midsummer Night's 
Dream," compared with 
"Old Fortunatus," 65. 

Millais, 203. 

Milton, indebted to Marlowe. 
5, 38. 50. 95 150; indebted 
to Middleton, 157, 170, 236. 
199; indebted to Haywood. 
217. 

Minto, on Chapman. 260. 

"Miseries of Enforced Mar- 
riage, The." 246 

"Misery of a Prison and a 
Prisoner.The"(Dekker) .99. 

Moliere, Dekker compared 
with, 107; Marston. 132. 
133, 211; Heywood. 2'ri. 
216. 222. 

"Monsieur d'Olive" (Chap- 
man). 259. 

Morality plays. 156. 

" More Dissemblers Besides 
Women" (Middleton), 164. 



Morris, William, 215, 223. 
"Mountebank's Masque," 

138. 
Musffius, 256. 
"Myrrha" (Barkstead), 136. 

Nash,Thomas,8, 100,180,188. 
National characteristics on 

Heywood, Sidney, etc., 254. 
Nelson, 254. 
Newman, J. H., 89, 90. 
"News from Hell," 95. 
"New Wonder, A, etc." 

(Rowley), 191. 
"Northward Ho!", 20. 
"No Wit, No Help Like 

a Woman's" (Middleton), 

165. 

"Odyssey," Chapman's 

translation, 256. 
' ' Old Fortunatus ' ' ( Webster) , 

21, 30; "Midsummer 

Night's Dream" compared 

with, 65. 
"Old Law, The" (Rowley), 

167. 
Old Plays, Dilke's. 154, 195. 
One-part plays, 237. 
"Othello," 16, 31. 
Ovid, Marlowe's translations, 

12; source for Heywood, 

218; Dryden's translations, 

221. 
Oxford, 255. 

Painter, William, 58. 

"Palace of Pleasure, The" 
(Painter). 58. 

"Paradise Regained," 157. 

" Parasitaster, The" (Mars- 
ton). 133. 146. 

"Parliament of Bees. The," 

85- 
"Passionate Shepherd, The" 
(Marlowe), 13. 



INDEX 



299 



"Patient Grissel," 72. 

Patient Grizel, type of hero- 
ine, 247. 

Patriotism in Dante, Cole- 
ridge, Shakespeare, Virgil, 
202; in Heywood, 243, 245. 

Peele, George, 69, 205. 

Percy Society, 188. 

"Persae," the, 8r. 

Persius, Tourneur akin to, 
281. 

"Phoenix and Turtle, The," 
138, 156. 

Pickwick Papers, 100. 

Plautus, imitated by Dryden, 
Moliere, Rotrou, 216; mod- 
el for Hey^vood, 23 1, 240. 

Plymouth, 243. 

' ' Poetaster, The ' ' ( Jonson) , 
68, 133, 138. 

Ponsard, 38. 

Pope, 82, 228. 

"Prince Nicander's vein," 
223. 

Protestant animosity in dra- 
ma, 207. 

Prynne, William, 207. 

Psyche, subject of English 
poetry, 222, 223, 251. 

"Puritan, The," 181. 

Puritanism, 241, 278, 281, 
286 note. 

"Pygmalion's Image," 136. 

Queen Elizabeth, 69, 105, 

168, 211-213, 256. 
"Queen of Corinth, The," 

178. 
Quevedo, 95. 



Rabelais, 95; Rowley com- 
pared with, 190. 

Raleigh, Sir Walter, 69. 

Rand, verb, 189. 

" Rape of Lucrece, The," 
223. 



"Raven's Almanack, The" 
(Dekker), 103. 

Realism, in dialogue, 194; 
of Heywood and Fletcher. 
214, 247; differentiated 
from romanticism, 234. 

"Rehearsal, The," 226. 

Renascence, 281. 

Restoration, the, 157 note, 
259,278 

Return from Parnassus, 
The," 141. 

"Revenger's Tragedy, The" 
(Tourneur), 176, 268, 273, 
287. 

"Roaring Giri, The," 161. 

"Robert, Earl of Hunting- 
ton," 73. 

Rochester, Lord, 157. 

"Rod for Runaways, A" 
(Dekker), 103. 

" Romeo and Juliet," 69, 
179, 247- 

Rotrou, 216. 

Rowley, William (187-199), 
genius in comedy and 
tragedy, 24, 166-168; col- 
laboration with Middleton, 
161, 179, 181-183; com- 
pared with Dekker and 
Nash, 188; akin to Rabe- 
lais, 190; comic style com- 
pared with Dekker, Mid- 
dleton, Heywood, 191; 
theory of verse, 194; best 
as tragic poet, 196, 197; 
compared with Heywood, 
244. 

' ' Royal King and Loyal Sub- 
ject, The," 193, 232. 

St. George's Day, 190. 
"St. Patrick for Ireland" 

(Shirley), 194. 
"Samson Agonistes,"i57. 
Sancho Panza, 229. 



THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 



"Sardanapalus," 267 

" Satiromastix " (Dekker) , 69. 
127. 128. 

Scott. Sir Walter, 84; on Mid- 
dleton, 153. 

"Seaman The," 96. 

"Search for Money. A." 188. 

"Second Maiden's Tragedy. 
The." 174. 

"Sejanus,' 144. 

Selden, 163. 

Settle, Elkanah, 157 note. 

"Seven Deadly Sins of Lon- 
don, The," 93. 

Shad well, 251, 267. 

Shakespeare, Marlowe com- 
pared with, 2. 10, 14; 
translated by Hugo. 4; 
indebted to Marlowe, 5, 
14, 36; Webster compared 
with. 15-17- 29. 30, 33, 38. 
44-46, 52- 54, 57. 58; 
collaboration with Row- 
ley, 24; doctrine compared 
with ^schylus, 31; lyric 
quality, 50; greatest con- 
temporary of, 55; light 
comedy, 64; Webster on, 
65; Dekker compared with, 
67, 71, in humor, 108; bur- 
lesqued by Dekker, 68, 81; 
admonitory style in dia- 
logue, 98 ; " Venus and 
Adonis," 136; obscurity like 
Marston's, 137, 144; above 
Milton, Coleridge, and 
Shelley, 150; Middleton 
compared with, 154, 155, 
in humor, 158; characters, 
166, 182, 184; obligations 
to Middleton, 172; tragic 
invention, 176; method of 
work, 178; compared with 
Rowley, verse quality, 191, 
194; patriotism, 202; treat- 
ment of couplet, 205; on 



chronicle plays, 206, 209; 
"Richard II.," 208; Hey- 
wood compared with, 
blank verse, 224; national 
qualities in, 236; Dr. John- 
son on, 237; humanity, 
243; use of foreign words, 
246; quoted in Heywood's 
plays, 249; reference to 
Chapman, 260; Tourneur 
compared with, in dramat- 
ic dialogue, 263; verse mu- 
sic, 270; tragic hero, 274; 
poetic style, 276. 

Shakespeare Society, 19. 

Shelley. Marlowe's influence 
on, I, 16, 38; Dekker com- 
pared with, 72; Marston, 
137, 141, 177. 258. 

Shirley, 30, 38, 163, 194, 221. 

"Shadow of Night, The" 
(Chapman), 255. 

"Shoemaker, a Gentleman, 
A" (Rowley), 193. 

Sidney. Sir Philip, 18, 66,68, 
.224, 254, 258. 

Sigurd, 214. 

"Silver Age, The," 216. 

"Sir Giles Goosecap," 128. 

"Sir Peter Harpdon's End," 

215- 
"Sir Thomas More," 19. 
"Sir Thomas Wyatt, The 

Famous History of ," 19,22. 
"Sir Tristrem," 153. 
Slang, Rowley's, 195. 
Socrates, 169. 
Somerset, Earl of, 256. 
Sophocles, Webster compared 

with, 35-37, 52, 218, 221. 
' ' Sophonisba ' ' (Marston) ,116. 
Southey, on Rowley, 199. 
Sovereign of modern poets, 

35- 
Spain in drama, 168, 194, 
210, 234. 



INDEX 



301 



"Spanish Gipsy. The," 177, 
179. 

" Spanish Moor's Tragedy, 
The," 85. 

Spenser, i. 

Stanihurst's Virgil, 280. 

Sterne, Dekker's style com- 
pared to, 107; morbidity, 
121. 

"Strange Horse-race, A" 
(Dekker), 102. 

Strozzi, Ercole, 209. 

Study of Shakespeare, A, 11. 

Suckling, Sir John, 157. 

Sue, Eugene, 2,di- 

Swift, Jonathan, prose, 8, 17, 
121, 220; Tourneur com- 
pared to, 264. 

Tacitus, Marston's dialogue 
compared with, 119. 

"Tamburlaine," 2, 4, 11. 

"Taming of the Shrew, The," 
Marlowe's part in, 11. 

Tennyson, Webster's verse 
compared with, 20, 38, 
208; Hey wood compared 
with, 236, 278. 

Thackeray, Dekker's humor 
compared with, 106, 108. 

Thames, the, 190. 

Theocritus, imitated by Hey- 
wood, 214. 

"Thomas of Reading, etc.," 
91. 

"Three Hours After Mar- 
riage," 82. 

"Titus Andronicus," 12. 

Tourneur, Cyril (262-289), 
cynicism compared with 
Webster, 17, 60; verse 
compared with Middleton, 
172, 176; poetic passion, 
182; allegory, 180; reflec- 
tive quality, 263; dialogue 
compared with Shake- 



speare, Webster, 263 ; shows 
influence of age, 268; verse 
quality, 269, 270; dramat- 
ic quality, 271, 272; re- 
venge as theme, 273; mas- 
ter-work, 273; comparable 
only with Shakespeare, 
276, 277, 280, 281, 282, 
288; sublimity, 280; akin 
to Juvenal, Persius, 281; 
tragic style, 285; moral pas- 
sion, 289. 

"Transformed Metamorpho- 
sis, The" (Tourneur), 180, 
279. 

Travel, motive for drama, 
242. 

"Travels of Three English 
Brothers, The," 242. 

"Trial of Chivalry, The" 
(Heywood), 228, 229, 235. 

"Traitor, The," 30. 

"Trick to Catch the Old One, 
A" (Middleton), 158, 160. 

"Troilus and Cressida," 220, 
223, 277. 

"Troja Britannica" (Hey- 
wood), 212. 

Troy "Histories" of, 213. 

Tupper, Martin, 228. 

Turner, 285. 

Twain, Mark, 228. 

"Two Foscari, The," 267. 

" Two Gentlemen of Verona," 
155- 

"Two Noble Kinsmen, The," 
Shakespeare's part in, 20. 

"Tyrannic Love," 226. 

Vanini, Tourneur successor 
of, 266. 

Vere, Sir Francis, Tourneur' s 
elegy on, 277. 

"Venus and Adonis," 238. 

Villon, Franc^ois, Dekker com- 
pared with, 61. 



302 THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 



Vindice, 60. 

Virgil, source for "Dido, 

Queen of Carthage," 8; 

love of country, 202. 
"Virgin Martyr, The" (Dek- 

ker), 88, 194. 
" Volpone," 144. 
Voltaire, 199. 

Watson, 141. 

Webster, John (15-67), tragic 
imagination compared with 
Shakespeare, 15, 29, 30, 
58, 59, 176, 190; collabora- 
tion with Dekker, 19; with 
Rowley, 23, 24; indepen- 
dent of other poets, 32; 
tragic quality, 46; lyric 
quahty, 51; metrical faults, 
S3, 54; compared with Mar- 
lowe, 58; with Mars ton, 
59; with Middleton, 172, 
182; foreign words, 246; 
compared with Tourneur, 
dialogue, 263; verse, 270; 
style, 276, 280; tragic 
heroes, 281. 

"Westward Ho!", 20. 

" What you Will" (Marston), 
127, 128, 146. 

"White Devil, The" (Web- 
ster), 16, 32, 37, 40, 270. 

"Whore of Babylon, The," 
168. 

"Widow, The" (Middleton), 
164. 

"Widow's Tears, The" 
(Chapman), 259. 

Wilkins, George, 244. 



"William Eps his death" 
(Dekker), 95. 

" Wisdom of Solomon, The," 
180. 

" Wise Woman of Hogsdon, 
The" (Hey wood), 245. 

"Witch, The" (Middleton), 
relation to Macbeth, 171, 
172. 

Witchcraft, 251. 

"Witches of Lancashire, 
The," 250, 251. 

Wither, 50. 

" Woman Killed with Kind- 
ness, A" (Haywood), 212, 
238, 240, 249. 

" Women Beware Women" 
(Middleton), 175, 177. 

" Wonder of a Kingdom, 
The" (Dekker), 84. 

"Wonder of Women, The" 
(Marston), 116, 122. 

"Wonderful Year, The," 93. 

Wood, Anthony, on Chap- 
man, 255. 

Wordsworth, love of coun- 
try, 202; Heywood com- 
pared with, 236. 

" Work for Armourers" 
(Dekker), 102. 

" Works and Days," Chap- 
man's translation, 256. 

" World Tost at Tennis, The," 
179. 

"Your Five Gallants" 
(Middleton), i6o. 

Zola, Emile, 33. 



THE END 



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